Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System

Lex Fridman (02:02.500)

The inner solar system has the planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.

Konstantin Batygin (02:07.800)

Now Mercury is about 40% of the orbital separation of where the Earth is.

Konstantin Batygin (02:14.800)

It's closer to the sun, Venus is about 70%, then Mars is about 160% further away from

Konstantin Batygin (02:25.160)

the sun than is the Earth.

Lex Fridman (02:27.400)

These planets that we, one of them we occupy, right, are pretty small, okay?

Konstantin Batygin (02:33.680)

They're two leading order sort of heavily overgrown asteroids, if you will.

Lex Fridman (02:40.880)

And this becomes evident when you move out further in the solar system and encounter

Konstantin Batygin (02:46.920)

Jupiter, which is 316 Earth masses, right, 10 times the size.

Konstantin Batygin (02:53.880)

You know, and Saturn is another huge one, 90 Earth masses at about 10 times the separation

Konstantin Batygin (03:00.320)

from the sun as is the Earth, and then you have Uranus and Neptune at 20 and 30 respectively.

Konstantin Batygin (03:07.600)

For a long time, that is where the kind of massive part of the solar system ended.

Lex Fridman (03:15.560)

But what we've learned in the last 30 years is that beyond Neptune, there's this expansive

Lex Fridman (03:22.760)

field of icy debris, a second icy asteroid belt in the solar system.

Konstantin Batygin (03:27.560)

A lot of people have heard of the asteroid belt, which lives between Mars and Jupiter,

Lex Fridman (03:33.880)

right?

Konstantin Batygin (03:34.880)

That's a pretty common thing that people like to imagine and draw on lunch boxes and stuff.

Lex Fridman (03:40.880)

But beyond Neptune, there's a much more massive and much more radially expansive field of

Konstantin Batygin (03:47.760)

debris.

Konstantin Batygin (03:48.760)

Pluto, by the way, it belongs to that second, you know, icy asteroid belt, which we call

Konstantin Batygin (03:54.840)

the Kuiper belt.

Lex Fridman (03:55.840)

It's just a big object within that population of bodies.

Konstantin Batygin (03:59.520)

Wow, Pluto the planet.

Lex Fridman (04:01.280)

Pluto the dwarf planet, the former planet, you know.

Lex Fridman (04:05.160)

Why is Pluto not a planet anymore?

Lex Fridman (04:07.920)

I mean, it's tiny.

Konstantin Batygin (04:09.400)

We used to...

Lex Fridman (04:10.400)

So size matters when it comes to planets.

Konstantin Batygin (04:12.400)

Oh, 100%, 100%.

Lex Fridman (04:13.760)

It's actually a fascinating story.

Konstantin Batygin (04:15.980)

When Pluto was discovered in 1930, the reason it was discovered in the first place is because

Konstantin Batygin (04:22.400)

astronomers at the time were looking for a seven Earth mass planet somewhere beyond Neptune.

Konstantin Batygin (04:29.000)

It was hypothesized that such an object exists.

Konstantin Batygin (04:32.080)

When they found something, they interpreted that as a seven Earth mass planet and immediately

Konstantin Batygin (04:38.080)

revised its mass downward because they couldn't resolve the object with the telescope.

Lex Fridman (04:42.960)

So it looked like just a point mass, you know, star rather than a physical disk.

Lex Fridman (04:47.640)

They said, well, maybe it's not seven, maybe it's one, right?

Lex Fridman (04:50.840)

And then, so over the next, you know, I guess 40 years, Pluto's mass kept getting revised

Konstantin Batygin (04:56.920)

downwards, downwards, downwards until it was realized that it's like 500 times less massive

Lex Fridman (05:04.400)

than the Earth.

Konstantin Batygin (05:05.400)

I mean, like Pluto's surface area is almost perfectly equal to the surface area of Russia

Lex Fridman (05:12.820)

actually.

Lex Fridman (05:13.820)

And you know, Russia is big, but it's not a planet.

Lex Fridman (05:17.120)

Well, I mean, actually we can touch more on that.

Konstantin Batygin (05:20.400)

That's another discussion.

Lex Fridman (05:22.640)

So in some sense, earlier in the century, Pluto represented kind of our ignorance about

Konstantin Batygin (05:29.040)

the edges of the solar system.

Lex Fridman (05:31.560)

And perhaps planet nine is the thing that represents our ignorance about now the modern

Konstantin Batygin (05:37.880)

set of ignorances about the edges of our solar system.

Lex Fridman (05:41.360)

That's a good way to put it.

Konstantin Batygin (05:42.560)

By the way, just imagining this belt of astral debris at the edge of our solar system is

Lex Fridman (05:48.920)

incredible.

Lex Fridman (05:49.920)

Can you talk about it a little bit?

Lex Fridman (05:51.740)

What is the Kuiper belt and what is the Oort cloud?

Konstantin Batygin (05:56.280)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (05:57.280)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (05:58.280)

So look, the simple way to think about it is that if you imagine, you know, Neptune's

Lex Fridman (06:02.680)

orbit like a circle, right?

Konstantin Batygin (06:05.280)

Kind of maybe a factor of one and a half, 1.3 times bigger on a radius of 1.3 times

Lex Fridman (06:14.880)

bigger, you've got a whole collection of icy objects.

Konstantin Batygin (06:18.600)

Most of these objects are sort of the size of Austin, you know, maybe a little bit smaller.

Konstantin Batygin (06:26.200)

If you then zoom out and explore the orbits of the most long period Kuiper belt object,

Konstantin Batygin (06:36.120)

these are the things that have the biggest orbits and take the longest time to go around

Konstantin Batygin (06:42.000)

in, then what you find is that beyond a critical orbit size, beyond a critical orbit period,

Konstantin Batygin (06:49.600)

which is about 4,000 years, you start to see weird structure, like all the orbits sort

Lex Fridman (06:56.280)

of point into one direction.

Lex Fridman (06:58.840)

And all the orbits are kind of tilted in the same way by about 20 degrees with respect

Lex Fridman (07:04.600)

to Sun.

Konstantin Batygin (07:05.600)

This is particularly pronounced in orbits that are not heavily affected by Neptune.

Lex Fridman (07:11.160)

So there you start to see this weird dichotomy where they're objects which are stable, which

Konstantin Batygin (07:17.880)

Neptune does not mess with gravitationally, and unstable objects.

Konstantin Batygin (07:22.320)

The unstable objects are basically all over the place because they're being kicked around

Konstantin Batygin (07:27.020)

by Neptune.

Lex Fridman (07:28.020)

The stable orbits show this remarkable pattern of clustering.

Konstantin Batygin (07:33.360)

We back, I guess, five years ago interpreted this pattern of clustering as a gravitational

Lex Fridman (07:39.600)

one way sign, the existence of a planet in a distant planet, right?

Konstantin Batygin (07:45.680)

Something that is shepherding and confining these orbits together.

Konstantin Batygin (07:50.600)

Of course, right, you have to have some skepticism when you're talking about these things.

Lex Fridman (07:57.000)

You have to ask the question of, okay, how statistically significant is this clustering?

Lex Fridman (08:01.760)

And there are many authors that have indeed called that into question.

Konstantin Batygin (08:06.600)

We have done our own analyses and basically, just like with all statistics where there's

Konstantin Batygin (08:11.920)

kind of multiple ways to do the exercise, you can either ask the question of if I have

Konstantin Batygin (08:21.400)

a telescope that has surveyed this part of the sky, what are the chances that I would

Lex Fridman (08:27.380)

discover this clustering?

Lex Fridman (08:30.320)

That basically tells you that you have zero confidence, right?

Lex Fridman (08:36.000)

That does not give you a confident answer one way or another.

Konstantin Batygin (08:40.100)

Another way to do the statistics, which is what we prefer to do, is to say we have a

Lex Fridman (08:45.240)

whole night sky of discoveries in the Kuiper Belt, right?

Lex Fridman (08:50.920)

And if we have some object over there, which has right ascension and declination, which

Konstantin Batygin (08:56.520)

is a way to say it's there on the sky, and it has some brightness, that means somebody

Konstantin Batygin (09:01.660)

looked over there and discovered an object, was able to discover an object of that brightness

Lex Fridman (09:07.800)

or brighter.

Konstantin Batygin (09:09.360)

Through that analysis, you can construct a whole map on the sky of kind of where all

Lex Fridman (09:14.160)

of the surveys that have ever been done have collectively looked.

Lex Fridman (09:18.320)

So if you do the exercise this way, the false alarm probability of the clustering on which

Lex Fridman (09:25.560)

the Planet Nine hypothesis is built is about 0.4%.

Konstantin Batygin (09:28.720)

Wow, okay, so there's a million questions here.

Lex Fridman (09:32.280)

One, when you say bright objects, why are they bright?

Konstantin Batygin (09:35.320)

Are we talking about actual objects within the Kuiper Belt or the stuff we see through

Lex Fridman (09:38.920)

the Kuiper Belt?

Konstantin Batygin (09:39.920)

This is the actual stuff we see in the Kuiper Belt.

Lex Fridman (09:42.360)

The way you go about discovering Kuiper Belt objects is pretty easy.

Lex Fridman (09:46.040)

I mean, it's easy in theory, right?

Lex Fridman (09:49.260)

Hard in practice.

Lex Fridman (09:50.620)

All you do is you take snapshots of the sky, right?

Lex Fridman (09:54.640)

Use that direction, say, and take a high exposure snapshot.

Konstantin Batygin (09:59.240)

Then you wait a night and you do it again, and then you wait another night and you do

Lex Fridman (10:03.320)

it again.

Konstantin Batygin (10:05.000)

Objects that are just random stars in the galaxy don't move on the sky, whereas objects

Lex Fridman (10:09.920)

in the solar system will slowly move.

Konstantin Batygin (10:11.980)

This is no different than if you're driving down the freeway, it looks like trees are

Lex Fridman (10:17.640)

going by you faster than the clouds, right?

Konstantin Batygin (10:19.920)

This is parallax.

Lex Fridman (10:21.600)

That's it.

Konstantin Batygin (10:22.600)

It's they're reflecting light off of the sun and it's going back and hitting this.

Konstantin Batygin (10:27.440)

There's a little bit of a glimmer from the different objects that you can see based on

Konstantin Batygin (10:31.480)

the reflection from the sun.

Lex Fridman (10:32.760)

So like there's actual light, it's not darkness.

Konstantin Batygin (10:36.140)

That's right.

Konstantin Batygin (10:37.140)

These are just big icicles basically that are just reflecting sunlight back at you.

Konstantin Batygin (10:41.880)

It's then easy to understand why it's so hard to discover them because light has to travel

Konstantin Batygin (10:47.840)

to something like 40 times the distance between the earth and the sun and then get reflected

Konstantin Batygin (10:54.960)

back.

Lex Fridman (10:55.960)

Was that like an hour travel?

Konstantin Batygin (10:57.440)

Yeah, that's right.

Konstantin Batygin (10:58.880)

That's something like that because the earth to the sun is eight minutes, I believe.

Konstantin Batygin (11:04.720)

Something in that order of magnitude.

Lex Fridman (11:07.980)

So that's interesting.

Lex Fridman (11:09.680)

So you have to account for all of that.

Lex Fridman (11:12.320)

And then there's a huge amount of data, pixels that are coming from the pictures and you

Konstantin Batygin (11:18.360)

have to integrate all of that together to paint a sort of like a high estimate of the

Lex Fridman (11:24.840)

different objects.

Lex Fridman (11:25.840)

Can you track them?

Lex Fridman (11:26.840)

Can you be like, that's Bob?

Lex Fridman (11:27.840)

Like, can you like?

Lex Fridman (11:29.400)

Yes, exactly.

Konstantin Batygin (11:30.400)

In fact, one of them is named Joe Biden.

Lex Fridman (11:33.720)

I mean, I'm not like, this is not even a joke, right?

Lex Fridman (11:36.920)

Is there a Trump one or no?

Lex Fridman (11:38.400)

No, no.

Konstantin Batygin (11:39.400)

Not yet.

Lex Fridman (11:40.400)

I don't know.

Konstantin Batygin (11:41.400)

I don't know for that.

Lex Fridman (11:43.000)

But like the way it works is if you discover one, you right away get a license plate for

Konstantin Batygin (11:49.840)

it.

Lex Fridman (11:51.040)

So like the first four numbers is the first year that this object has appeared on, you

Konstantin Batygin (11:56.840)

know, in the data set, if you will.

Lex Fridman (12:00.000)

And then there's like this code that follows it, which basically tells you where in the

Lex Fridman (12:06.920)

sky it is, right?

Lex Fridman (12:08.160)

So one of the really interesting Kuiper Belt objects, which is very much part of the Planet

Konstantin Batygin (12:13.640)

Nine story is called VP113, because Joe Biden was vice president at the time, you know,

Lex Fridman (12:20.760)

got nicknamed Biden.

Lex Fridman (12:22.760)

VP113?

Lex Fridman (12:23.760)

Yeah.

Konstantin Batygin (12:24.760)

He got nicknamed Biden.

Lex Fridman (12:27.600)

Beautiful.

Lex Fridman (12:28.600)

What's the fingerprint for any particular object?

Lex Fridman (12:32.720)

Like how do you know it's the same one?

Konstantin Batygin (12:34.200)

Or you just kind of like, yeah, from night to night, you take a picture, how do you know

Lex Fridman (12:38.480)

it's the same object?

Konstantin Batygin (12:39.480)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (12:40.480)

So the way you know is it appears in almost exactly the same part of the sky except for

Konstantin Batygin (12:45.120)

move, but it moves.

Lex Fridman (12:46.120)

But this is why actually you need at least three nights because oftentimes asteroids,

Konstantin Batygin (12:53.640)

which are much closer to the earth, like will appear to move only slightly, but then on

Lex Fridman (13:02.300)

the third night will move away.

Lex Fridman (13:03.640)

So that third night is really there to detect acceleration.

Konstantin Batygin (13:07.480)

Now the thing that I didn't really realize until, you know, I started observing together

Konstantin Batygin (13:15.080)

with my partner in crime in all this, Mike Brown, is just the fact that for the first

Konstantin Batygin (13:20.880)

year when you make these detections, the only thing you really know with confidence is where

Lex Fridman (13:26.480)

it is on the night sky and how far away it is, okay?

Lex Fridman (13:30.580)

That's it.

Lex Fridman (13:31.580)

It's all about the orbit because over three days the object just moves so little, right?

Lex Fridman (13:38.600)

That whole motion on the sky is entirely coming from motion of the earth, right?

Lex Fridman (13:43.240)

So the earth is kind of the car, the object is the tree and you see it move.

Lex Fridman (13:47.400)

So then to get some confident information about what its orbit looks like, you have

Konstantin Batygin (13:52.680)

to come back a year later and then measure it again.

Lex Fridman (13:56.640)

Oh, interesting.

Lex Fridman (13:57.640)

So three nights then come back a year later and do another three nights so you get the

Konstantin Batygin (14:01.640)

velocity of the acceleration from the three nights and then you have the maybe the additional

Konstantin Batygin (14:07.560)

information.

Lex Fridman (14:08.560)

Because an orbit is basically described by six parameters.

Lex Fridman (14:11.520)

So you at least need six independent points, but in reality you need many more observations

Lex Fridman (14:17.180)

to really pin down the orbit well.

Lex Fridman (14:20.660)

And from that you're able to construct for that one particular object and orbit and then

Lex Fridman (14:24.280)

there's of course, like how many objects are there?

Konstantin Batygin (14:27.840)

There's like four ish thousand now.

Lex Fridman (14:31.560)

But like the, in the future that could be like millions.

Konstantin Batygin (14:36.800)

Oh sure, oh sure.

Lex Fridman (14:39.040)

So in fact these things are hard to predict, but there's a new observatory called the Vera

Konstantin Batygin (14:43.720)

Rubin Observatory, which is coming online maybe next year.

Konstantin Batygin (14:48.200)

I mean with COVID these things are a little bit more uncertain, but they've actually been

Konstantin Batygin (14:53.280)

making great progress with construction.

Lex Fridman (14:56.340)

And so that telescope is just going to sort of scan the night sky every day automatically

Lex Fridman (15:04.200)

and just, it's such an efficient survey that it might increase the census of the distant

Lex Fridman (15:11.820)

Kuiper Belt, the things that I'm interested in by a factor of a hundred.

Konstantin Batygin (15:15.600)

I mean that would be, that would be really cool.

Lex Fridman (15:18.200)

And yeah, that's a, that's an incredible...

Konstantin Batygin (15:22.520)

I mean they might just find planet nine.

Lex Fridman (15:26.480)

I mean that's...

Konstantin Batygin (15:27.480)

Like almost like literally pictures, like visually.

Lex Fridman (15:29.720)

I mean, sure.

Konstantin Batygin (15:30.720)

Yeah.

Konstantin Batygin (15:31.720)

Like the first detection you make, all you know is where it is in the sky and how far

Konstantin Batygin (15:34.280)

away it is.

Konstantin Batygin (15:35.280)

If something is, you know, 500 times away from the sun, as far away from the sun as

Konstantin Batygin (15:39.800)

is the earth, you know that's planet nine.

Lex Fridman (15:42.200)

That's when the story concludes and then you can study it.

Konstantin Batygin (15:45.920)

Now you can study it.

Lex Fridman (15:46.920)

Yeah.

Konstantin Batygin (15:47.920)

By the way, I'm going to use that as like, I don't know, a pickup line or a dating strategy,

Konstantin Batygin (15:51.760)

like see the person for three days and then don't see them at all and then see them again

Konstantin Batygin (15:56.720)

in a year to determine the orbit.

Lex Fridman (15:59.040)

And over time you figure out if sort of from a cosmic perspective, this, this whole thing

Konstantin Batygin (16:06.000)

works.

Lex Fridman (16:07.000)

Yeah.

Konstantin Batygin (16:08.000)

I have no dating advice to give.

Konstantin Batygin (16:09.600)

I was going to use this as a metaphor to somehow map it onto the human condition.

Konstantin Batygin (16:16.000)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (16:17.000)

You mentioned the Kuiper Belt.

Lex Fridman (16:18.000)

What's the Oort cloud?

Konstantin Batygin (16:19.000)

If you look at the Neptune orbit as a one, then the Kuiper Belt is like 1.3 out there

Lex Fridman (16:25.800)

and then we get farther and farther into the darkness.

Lex Fridman (16:28.560)

What's the Oort cloud?

Lex Fridman (16:29.560)

So okay, you've got the kind of main Kuiper Belt, which is about say 1.3, 1.5.

Konstantin Batygin (16:36.320)

Then you have something called the scattered disc, which is kind of an extension of the

Konstantin Batygin (16:40.960)

Kuiper Belt.

Konstantin Batygin (16:41.960)

It's a bunch of these long, very elliptical orbits that hug the orbit of Neptune, but

Konstantin Batygin (16:48.480)

come out very far.

Lex Fridman (16:50.320)

So that, the scattered disc with the current senses, like the, some of the longest orbits

Konstantin Batygin (16:58.560)

we know of have a semi major axis.

Lex Fridman (17:04.760)

So half the orbit length, roughly speaking of about a thousand, thousand times the distance

Konstantin Batygin (17:10.080)

between the earth and the sun.

Konstantin Batygin (17:12.320)

Now if you keep moving out, okay, eventually once you're at sort of 10,000 to 100,000 roughly,

Konstantin Batygin (17:21.840)

that's where the Oort cloud is.

Konstantin Batygin (17:23.160)

Now the Oort cloud is a distinct population of icy bodies and is distinct from the Kuiper

Konstantin Batygin (17:30.120)

Belt.

Konstantin Batygin (17:31.120)

In fact, it's so expansive that it ends roughly halfway between us and the next star.

Konstantin Batygin (17:39.240)

It's edge is just dictated by to what extent does the solar gravity reach.

Lex Fridman (17:45.360)

Solar gravity reaches that far?

Lex Fridman (17:47.600)

So it has to, wow, imagining this is a little bit overwhelming.

Lex Fridman (17:55.060)

So there's like a giant, like vast icy rock thingy.

Konstantin Batygin (18:03.560)

It's like a sphere.

Konstantin Batygin (18:04.560)

It's like, it's an almost spherical structure that engulfs, that encircles the sun and all

Konstantin Batygin (18:12.360)

the long period comets come from the Oort cloud.

Konstantin Batygin (18:16.360)

They come, the way that they appear, I mean, for already, I don't know, hundreds of years

Konstantin Batygin (18:21.440)

we've been detecting and occasionally like a comet will come in and it seemingly comes

Lex Fridman (18:28.440)

out of nowhere.

Lex Fridman (18:29.640)

The reason these long period comets appear on very, very long timescales, right?

Konstantin Batygin (18:36.320)

These Oort cloud objects that are sitting 30,000 times as far away from the sun as is

Konstantin Batygin (18:42.400)

the earth actually interact with the gravity of the galaxy, the tide, effectively the tide

Konstantin Batygin (18:48.020)

that the galaxy exerts upon them and their orbits slowly change and they elongate to

Konstantin Batygin (18:53.680)

the point where once they, their closest approach to the sun starts to reach a critical distance

Konstantin Batygin (19:01.160)

where ice starts to sublimate, then we discover them as comets because then the ice comes

Konstantin Batygin (19:07.080)

off of them.

Konstantin Batygin (19:08.280)

They look beautiful in the night sky, et cetera, but they're all coming from really, really

Konstantin Batygin (19:13.520)

far away.

Lex Fridman (19:14.520)

So is there, are any of them coming our way from collisions?

Lex Fridman (19:19.240)

Like how many collisions are there or is there a bunch of space for them to move around?

Lex Fridman (19:22.840)

Yeah, there's zero.

Konstantin Batygin (19:24.080)

It's completely collisionless out there.

Lex Fridman (19:27.080)

The physical radii of objects are so small compared to the distance between them, right?

Konstantin Batygin (19:33.120)

It's just, it is truly a collisionless environment.

Lex Fridman (19:38.400)

I don't know.

Konstantin Batygin (19:39.720)

I think that probably in the age of the solar system have literally been zero collisions

Lex Fridman (19:46.920)

in the Oort cloud.

Konstantin Batygin (19:48.480)

Wow.

Lex Fridman (19:49.480)

So if you like draw a picture of the solar system, everything's really close together.

Lex Fridman (19:53.880)

So everything I guess here is spaced far apart.

Lex Fridman (19:57.720)

Do rogue planets like fly in every once in a while and join?

Lex Fridman (1:00:00.880)

you can be, you can play, what is it?

Konstantin Batygin (1:00:04.400)

Red dead, red dead redemption, redemption, and that you can ride horses in the video

Konstantin Batygin (1:00:08.920)

game world.

Lex Fridman (1:00:09.920)

That's true.

Lex Fridman (1:00:10.920)

So let me return us back to planet nine.

Lex Fridman (1:00:14.200)

Always a good place to come back to.

Lex Fridman (1:00:15.880)

So now that we did a big historical overview of our solar system, what is planet nine?

Lex Fridman (1:00:21.480)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (1:00:22.640)

Planet nine is a hypothetical object that orbits the solar system, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:00:28.960)

On orbital period of about 10,000 years and an orbit, which is slightly tilted with respect

Konstantin Batygin (1:00:36.760)

to the plane of the solar system, slightly eccentric and the object itself we think is

Lex Fridman (1:00:42.280)

five times more massive than the earth.

Konstantin Batygin (1:00:46.520)

We have never seen planet nine in a telescope, but we have gravitational evidence for it.

Lex Fridman (1:00:53.640)

And so this is where all the stuff we've been talking about, this clustering ideas, maybe

Konstantin Batygin (1:00:58.160)

you can speak to the approximate location that we suspect.

Lex Fridman (1:01:02.080)

And also the question I wanted to ask is what are we supposed to be imagining here?

Konstantin Batygin (1:01:07.160)

Because you said there are certain objects in the Kuiper Belt that are kind of have a

Lex Fridman (1:01:11.400)

direction to them that they're all like flocking in some kind of way.

Lex Fridman (1:01:16.320)

So that's the sense that there's some kind of gravitational object, not changing their

Lex Fridman (1:01:20.120)

orbit, but kind of confining them, like grouping their orbits together.

Konstantin Batygin (1:01:25.720)

See, what would happen if planet nine were not there is these orbits that roughly share

Lex Fridman (1:01:31.040)

a common orientation, they would just disperse, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:01:35.480)

They would just become as a mutually symmetric point everywhere.

Konstantin Batygin (1:01:39.780)

Planet nine's gravity makes it such that these objects stay in a state that's basically anti

Konstantin Batygin (1:01:47.640)

aligned with respect to the orbit of planet nine and sort of hang out there and kind of

Lex Fridman (1:01:55.640)

oscillate on a timescale of about a billion years.

Konstantin Batygin (1:01:58.700)

That's one of the lines of evidence for the existence of planet nine.

Lex Fridman (1:02:03.420)

There are others.

Konstantin Batygin (1:02:04.420)

That's the one that's easiest to maybe visualize just because it's fun to think about orbits

Konstantin Batygin (1:02:08.060)

that all point into the same direction, but I should, you know, emphasize that, for example,

Konstantin Batygin (1:02:15.240)

the existence of objects, again, Kuiper Belt objects that are heavily out of the plane

Konstantin Batygin (1:02:20.820)

of the solar system, things that are tilted by say 90 degrees, that's not, we don't expect

Konstantin Batygin (1:02:26.720)

that as an outcome of planet formation.

Konstantin Batygin (1:02:29.920)

Indeed, planet formation simulations have never produced such objects without some extrinsic

Konstantin Batygin (1:02:37.520)

gravitational force.

Konstantin Batygin (1:02:38.520)

Planet nine, on the other hand, generates them very readily, so that provides kind of

Konstantin Batygin (1:02:43.160)

an alternative, you know, population of small bodies in the solar system that also get produced

Lex Fridman (1:02:50.660)

by planet nine through an independent kind of gravitational effect.

Lex Fridman (1:02:54.240)

So they're kind of, there's basically five different things that planet nine does individually

Konstantin Batygin (1:03:02.840)

that are like kind of maybe a one sigma effect where you'd say, yeah, okay, if that's all

Konstantin Batygin (1:03:08.500)

it was, maybe it's not, no reason to jump up and down, but because it's a multitude

Konstantin Batygin (1:03:14.860)

of these puzzles that all are explained by one hypothesis, that's really the magnetism,

Konstantin Batygin (1:03:22.300)

the attraction of the planet nine model.

Lex Fridman (1:03:25.380)

So can you just clarify, so most orbit, most planets in the solar system orbit at approximately

Konstantin Batygin (1:03:34.160)

the same, so it's flat.

Lex Fridman (1:03:35.660)

Yeah, it's like one degree.

Konstantin Batygin (1:03:38.220)

The difference between them is about one degree.

Lex Fridman (1:03:41.700)

But nevertheless, if we looked at our solar system, it would look, and I could see every

Konstantin Batygin (1:03:46.540)

single object, it would look like a sphere.

Lex Fridman (1:03:49.140)

The inner part where the planets are would look like, you know, flat, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:03:54.900)

The Kuiper belt and the asteroid belt have a larger, it gets fatter and fatter and fatter

Lex Fridman (1:04:02.380)

and becomes a sphere.

Konstantin Batygin (1:04:03.800)

That's right.

Lex Fridman (1:04:04.800)

And if you look at the very outside, it's polluted by this quasi spheroidal thing.

Lex Fridman (1:04:11.300)

Nobody's of course ever seen the Oort cloud, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:04:14.660)

We've only seen comments that come from the Oort cloud so that the Oort cloud, which is

Konstantin Batygin (1:04:20.180)

this, right, population of distant debris, its existence is also inferred.

Konstantin Batygin (1:04:26.420)

You could say alternatively, there is, you know, there's a big cosmic creature that occasionally,

Konstantin Batygin (1:04:32.340)

you know, sitting at 20,000 AU and occasionally throws an icy rock towards the sun like that.

Lex Fridman (1:04:38.460)

Spaghetti monster, I think it's called.

Konstantin Batygin (1:04:40.260)

Okay.

Konstantin Batygin (1:04:41.260)

I mean, so it's a mystery in many ways, but you can kind of infer a bunch of things about

Konstantin Batygin (1:04:46.100)

it.

Lex Fridman (1:04:47.100)

And by the way, both terrifying and exciting that there's this vast darkness all around

Konstantin Batygin (1:04:51.340)

us that's full of objects that they're just throwing.

Lex Fridman (1:04:54.220)

Just there.

Konstantin Batygin (1:04:55.220)

Yeah.

Konstantin Batygin (1:04:56.220)

It's actually kind of astonishing, right, that we have only explored a small fraction

Lex Fridman (1:05:02.660)

of the solar system, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:05:04.980)

That really kind of baffles me because I remember as a student, you know, studying physics,

Konstantin Batygin (1:05:11.620)

you know, you do the problem where you put the earth around the sun, you solve that and

Konstantin Batygin (1:05:16.620)

like, it's one line of math and you say, okay, well, that surely was figured out by Newton.

Lex Fridman (1:05:22.540)

So like all the interesting stuff is not in the solar system, but that it's just plainly

Lex Fridman (1:05:29.920)

not true.

Konstantin Batygin (1:05:30.920)

There are mysteries in the solar system that are remarkable that we are only now starting

Lex Fridman (1:05:37.980)

to just kind of scratch the surface of.

Lex Fridman (1:05:40.460)

And some of those objects probably have some information about the history of our solar

Lex Fridman (1:05:44.340)

system.

Konstantin Batygin (1:05:45.340)

Absolutely.

Lex Fridman (1:05:46.340)

Like a great example is, you know, small meteorites, right?

Lex Fridman (1:05:50.460)

Small meteorites are melted, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:05:53.140)

They have, they're differentiated, meaning some of the iron sinks, you say, well, how

Lex Fridman (1:05:59.020)

can that be?

Konstantin Batygin (1:06:00.020)

Because they're so small that they wouldn't have melted just from the heat of their accretion.

Konstantin Batygin (1:06:04.540)

Turns out the fact that the solar nebula, the disk that made the planets was polluted

Lex Fridman (1:06:10.140)

by aluminum 26 is in itself a remarkable thing.

Konstantin Batygin (1:06:13.940)

It means the solar system did not form in isolation.

Konstantin Batygin (1:06:17.720)

It formed in a giant cloud of thousands of other stars that were also forming, some of

Konstantin Batygin (1:06:23.940)

which were undergoing, you know, going through supernova explosions, some of, and releasing

Lex Fridman (1:06:30.120)

these unstable isotopes that, of which we now see kind of the traces of.

Konstantin Batygin (1:06:37.900)

It's so cool.

Lex Fridman (1:06:38.900)

Do you think it's possible that life from other solar systems was injected and that

Lex Fridman (1:06:43.980)

was what was the origin of life on Earth?

Lex Fridman (1:06:47.700)

Yeah, the Panspermia idea.

Konstantin Batygin (1:06:51.140)

That's seen as a low probability event by people who studied the origin of life, but

Lex Fridman (1:06:54.580)

that's because then they would be out of a job.

Konstantin Batygin (1:06:58.220)

Well, I don't think they'd be out of the job because you just then say, you have to figure

Lex Fridman (1:07:02.020)

out how life started there.

Lex Fridman (1:07:04.260)

But then you have to go there.

Lex Fridman (1:07:05.460)

We can study life on Earth much easier.

Konstantin Batygin (1:07:07.740)

We could study it in the lab much easier because we can replicate conditions there from an

Konstantin Batygin (1:07:13.300)

early Earth much easier from a chemistry perspective, from a biology perspective.

Konstantin Batygin (1:07:19.780)

You can intuit a bunch of stuff.

Lex Fridman (1:07:21.160)

You can look at different parts of Earth and just.

Lex Fridman (1:07:23.740)

To an extent, I mean, the early Earth was completely unlike the current Earth, right?

Lex Fridman (1:07:28.780)

There was no oxygen.

Lex Fridman (1:07:30.020)

So one of my colleagues at Caltech, Joe Kirshnik, is certain, something like 100% certainty

Lex Fridman (1:07:41.260)

that life started on Mars and came to Earth on Martian meteorites.

Konstantin Batygin (1:07:48.120)

This is not a problem that I like to kind of think about too much, like the origin of

Lex Fridman (1:07:55.620)

life.

Konstantin Batygin (1:07:56.620)

It's a fascinating problem, but you know, it's not physics and I just like, I just don't

Lex Fridman (1:08:02.660)

love it.

Konstantin Batygin (1:08:03.660)

It's the same reason you don't love, I thought you're a musician, so music is not physics

Lex Fridman (1:08:08.140)

either.

Lex Fridman (1:08:09.140)

So why are you so into it?

Lex Fridman (1:08:10.140)

It's 100% physics.

Konstantin Batygin (1:08:11.140)

No, no, look, in all seriousness though, there are a few things that I really, really enjoy.

Lex Fridman (1:08:20.860)

I genuinely enjoy physics.

Konstantin Batygin (1:08:23.300)

I genuinely enjoy music.

Lex Fridman (1:08:24.820)

I genuinely, you know, enjoy martial arts and I genuinely enjoy my family.

Konstantin Batygin (1:08:31.460)

I should have said that all in a reverse order or something, but I like to focus on these

Lex Fridman (1:08:35.980)

things and not worry too much about everything else.

Lex Fridman (1:08:39.820)

You know what I mean?

Lex Fridman (1:08:40.820)

Yes.

Konstantin Batygin (1:08:41.820)

Just because there is a, like you said earlier, there's a time constraint.

Lex Fridman (1:08:44.900)

You can't do it all.

Konstantin Batygin (1:08:47.420)

There's many mysteries all around us.

Lex Fridman (1:08:50.740)

And they're all beautiful in different ways.

Konstantin Batygin (1:08:53.400)

To me, that thing I love is artificial intelligence that perhaps I love it because eventually

Lex Fridman (1:08:59.460)

I'm trying to suck up to our future overlords.

Konstantin Batygin (1:09:03.860)

The question of, you said there's a lot of kind of little pieces of evidence for this

Lex Fridman (1:09:09.000)

thing that's Planet Nine.

Konstantin Batygin (1:09:11.500)

If we were to try to collect more evidence or be certain, like a paper that says, like

Lex Fridman (1:09:18.420)

you drop it, clear, we're done.

Lex Fridman (1:09:22.300)

What does that require?

Lex Fridman (1:09:23.300)

Are sending probes out or do you think we can do it from telescopes here on earth?

Lex Fridman (1:09:28.700)

What are the different ideas for conclusive evidence for Planet Nine?

Lex Fridman (1:09:32.060)

The moment Planet Nine gets imaged from a telescope on earth, it's done.

Konstantin Batygin (1:09:36.820)

I mean, it's just there.

Lex Fridman (1:09:37.820)

Can you clarify it?

Lex Fridman (1:09:38.820)

Cause you mentioned that before from an image, would you be able to tell?

Lex Fridman (1:09:42.940)

Yes.

Lex Fridman (1:09:43.940)

So from an image, the moment you see something, something that is reflecting sunlight back

Konstantin Batygin (1:09:51.740)

at you and you know that it's hundreds of times as far away from the sun as the earth,

Konstantin Batygin (1:10:01.980)

you're done.

Lex Fridman (1:10:02.980)

So you're thinking, so basically if you have a really far away thing that's big, five times

Konstantin Batygin (1:10:08.020)

the size of earth, that means that is Planet Nine.

Lex Fridman (1:10:13.920)

Could there be multiple objects like that?

Konstantin Batygin (1:10:15.460)

I guess.

Lex Fridman (1:10:16.460)

In principle, yeah.

Konstantin Batygin (1:10:17.460)

I mean, there's no law of physics that doesn't allow you to have multiple, there's also no

Lex Fridman (1:10:22.980)

evidence at present for there being multiple.

Konstantin Batygin (1:10:25.740)

I wonder if it's possible, just like we're finding exoplanets, whether given the size

Konstantin Batygin (1:10:31.380)

of the Oort Cloud, there's basically, it's rarer and rarer, but there are sprinkled Planet

Konstantin Batygin (1:10:36.300)

Nine, 10, 11, 12, like these, some.

Lex Fridman (1:10:41.220)

Got 13.

Konstantin Batygin (1:10:42.220)

It goes after that.

Lex Fridman (1:10:43.220)

I can just keep counting.

Lex Fridman (1:10:45.180)

So just something about the dynamic system, it becomes lower and lower probability event,

Lex Fridman (1:10:50.660)

but they gather up, they become larger and larger maybe, something like that.

Konstantin Batygin (1:10:57.380)

I wonder if discovering Planet Nine will just be almost like a springboard, it's like, well,

Lex Fridman (1:11:04.500)

what's beyond that?

Konstantin Batygin (1:11:05.620)

It's entirely plausible.

Konstantin Batygin (1:11:06.840)

The Oort Cloud itself probably holds about five earth masses or seven earth masses of

Konstantin Batygin (1:11:12.220)

material.

Lex Fridman (1:11:13.220)

Right, so it's not nothing.

Lex Fridman (1:11:16.980)

And it all ultimately comes down to at what point will the observational surveys sample

Lex Fridman (1:11:27.420)

enough of the solar system to kind of reveal interesting things.

Konstantin Batygin (1:11:33.900)

There's a great analogy here with Neptune and the story of how Neptune was discovered.

Lex Fridman (1:11:38.780)

Neptune was not discovered by looking at the sky, right?

Lex Fridman (1:11:42.140)

It was discovered mathematically, right?

Lex Fridman (1:11:45.740)

So yeah, the orbit of Uranus, when Uranus was found, this was 1781, both the tracking

Konstantin Batygin (1:11:58.860)

of the orbit of Uranus as well as the reconstruction of the orbit of Uranus immediately revealed

Lex Fridman (1:12:05.900)

that it was not following the orbit that it was supposed to, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:12:10.220)

The predicted orbit deviated away from where it actually was.

Lex Fridman (1:12:13.980)

So in the mid 1800s, right, a French mathematician by the name of Orban Le Verrier did a beautifully

Konstantin Batygin (1:12:24.240)

sophisticated calculation which said if this is due to gravity of a more distant planet,

Lex Fridman (1:12:31.500)

then that planet is there, okay?

Lex Fridman (1:12:34.080)

And then they found it.

Lex Fridman (1:12:35.560)

But the point is the understanding of where to look for Neptune came entirely out of celestial

Konstantin Batygin (1:12:42.980)

mechanics.

Konstantin Batygin (1:12:43.980)

The case with Planet Nine is a little bit different because what we can do I think relatively

Konstantin Batygin (1:12:49.360)

well is predict the orbit and mass of Planet Nine.

Lex Fridman (1:12:52.060)

We cannot tell you where it is on its orbit.

Konstantin Batygin (1:12:54.820)

The reason is we haven't seen the Kuiper Belt objects complete an orbit, their own orbit,

Lex Fridman (1:13:02.200)

even once because it takes 4,000 years.

Lex Fridman (1:13:04.720)

But I plan to live on as an AI being, and I'll be tracking those orbits as, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:13:13.220)

for…

Lex Fridman (1:13:14.220)

So it takes 4,000 or 5,000 years.

Lex Fridman (1:13:15.220)

I mean, it doesn't have to be AI.

Konstantin Batygin (1:13:16.220)

It could be longevity.

Lex Fridman (1:13:17.220)

There's a lot of really exciting genetic engineering research.

Lex Fridman (1:13:19.740)

So you'll just be a brain waiting for the, your brain waiting for the orbit to complete

Lex Fridman (1:13:25.900)

for the basic Kuiper Belt objects.

Konstantin Batygin (1:13:27.900)

That's right.

Konstantin Batygin (1:13:28.900)

That's like kind of the worst reason to want to live a long time, right, just like can

Lex Fridman (1:13:34.860)

the brain like smoke a cigarette?

Lex Fridman (1:13:36.380)

I know, right?

Lex Fridman (1:13:37.380)

Can you just like light one up while you're waiting or?

Lex Fridman (1:13:44.020)

But you're making me actually realize that the one way to explore the galaxy is by just

Konstantin Batygin (1:13:52.420)

sitting here on Earth and waiting.

Lex Fridman (1:13:54.660)

So if we can just get really good at waiting, it's like a mua mua or these interstellar

Konstantin Batygin (1:13:59.460)

objects that fly in, you can just wait for them to come to you.

Lex Fridman (1:14:02.980)

Same with the aliens.

Konstantin Batygin (1:14:03.980)

You can wait for them to come to you.

Konstantin Batygin (1:14:05.180)

If you get really good at waiting, then that's one way to do the exploration because eventually

Konstantin Batygin (1:14:11.340)

the thing will come to you.

Konstantin Batygin (1:14:12.660)

Maybe that's the, maybe the intelligent alien civilizations get much better at waiting,

Lex Fridman (1:14:18.680)

and so they all decide, so game theoretically, to start waiting, and it's just a bunch of

Konstantin Batygin (1:14:23.140)

like ancient intelligent civilizations of aliens all throughout the universe, they're

Konstantin Batygin (1:14:27.460)

just sitting there waiting for each other.

Lex Fridman (1:14:29.420)

Look, you can't just be good at waiting.

Lex Fridman (1:14:31.780)

You gotta know how to chill, okay?

Lex Fridman (1:14:33.580)

Like you can't just like sit around and do nothing.

Konstantin Batygin (1:14:36.280)

You gotta be, you gotta know how to chill.

Konstantin Batygin (1:14:38.260)

I honestly think that as we progress, if the aliens are anything like us, we enjoy loving

Konstantin Batygin (1:14:45.940)

things we do, and it's very possible that we just figure out mechanisms here on Earth

Konstantin Batygin (1:14:52.820)

to enjoy our life, and we just stay here on Earth forever, that exploration becomes less

Lex Fridman (1:14:58.380)

and less of an interesting thing to do, and so you basically, yes, wait and chill.

Konstantin Batygin (1:15:03.420)

You get really optimally good at chilling, and thereby exploring is not that interesting,

Lex Fridman (1:15:09.440)

so in terms of 4,000 years, it would be nothing for scientists.

Konstantin Batygin (1:15:13.100)

We'll be chilling and just all kinds of scientific explorations will become possible because

Konstantin Batygin (1:15:18.340)

we'll just be here on Earth.

Lex Fridman (1:15:20.020)

So chill.

Lex Fridman (1:15:21.020)

So chill.

Konstantin Batygin (1:15:22.020)

You have a paper out recently, because you already mentioned some of these ideas, but

Konstantin Batygin (1:15:26.060)

I'd love it if you could dig into it a little bit.

Lex Fridman (1:15:28.100)

Yeah, of course.

Konstantin Batygin (1:15:29.100)

The injection of inner Oort Cloud objects into the distant Kuiper Belt by Planet Nine.

Lex Fridman (1:15:35.100)

What is this idea of Planet Nine injecting objects into the Kuiper Belt?

Konstantin Batygin (1:15:40.820)

Okay, let me take a brief step back, and when we do calculations of Planet Nine, when we

Konstantin Batygin (1:15:47.740)

do the simulations, as far as our simulations are concerned, sort of the Neptune, like kind

Konstantin Batygin (1:15:57.380)

of the transneptunian solar system is entirely sourced from the inside, namely the Kuiper

Konstantin Batygin (1:16:05.300)

Belt gets scattered by Neptune, and then Planet Nine does things to it and aligns the orbits

Lex Fridman (1:16:10.840)

and so on, and then we calculate what happens on the lifetime of the solar system, yada,

Lex Fridman (1:16:17.060)

yada, yada.

Konstantin Batygin (1:16:18.580)

During the pandemic, one of the kind of questions we asked ourselves, and this is indeed something

Konstantin Batygin (1:16:23.100)

we, Mike and I, Mike Brown, who's a partner in crime on this, and I do regularly, is we

Lex Fridman (1:16:31.460)

say how can we A, disprove ourselves, and B, how can we improve our simulations?

Lex Fridman (1:16:39.300)

Like what's missing?

Konstantin Batygin (1:16:40.940)

One idea that maybe should have been obvious in retrospect is that all of our simulations

Lex Fridman (1:16:46.780)

treated the solar system as some isolated creature, right?

Lex Fridman (1:16:50.820)

But the solar system did not form in isolation, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:16:53.420)

It formed in this cluster of stars, and during that phase of forming together with thousands

Konstantin Batygin (1:16:59.780)

of other stars, we believe the solar system formed this almost spherical population of

Konstantin Batygin (1:17:06.540)

icy debris that sits maybe at a few thousand times the separation between the Earth and

Konstantin Batygin (1:17:16.980)

the Sun, maybe even a little bit closer.

Konstantin Batygin (1:17:20.420)

If Planet Nine's not there, that population is completely dormant, and these objects just

Konstantin Batygin (1:17:25.900)

slowly orbit the Sun.

Konstantin Batygin (1:17:29.620)

Nothing interesting happens to them ever, but when we realize that if Planet Nine is

Konstantin Batygin (1:17:34.940)

there, Planet Nine can actually grab some of those objects and gravitationally reinject

Lex Fridman (1:17:39.340)

them into the distant solar system.

Lex Fridman (1:17:42.740)

So we thought, okay, let's look into this with numerical experiments.

Lex Fridman (1:17:46.740)

Do our simulations, does this process work, and if it works, what are its consequences?

Lex Fridman (1:17:53.020)

So it turns out, indeed, not only does Planet Nine inject these distant inner Oort cloud

Konstantin Batygin (1:18:01.460)

objects into the Kuiper Belt, they follow roughly the same pathway as the objects that

Konstantin Batygin (1:18:09.340)

are being scattered out.

Lex Fridman (1:18:10.940)

So there's this kind of river, two way river of material.

Konstantin Batygin (1:18:15.140)

Some of it is coming out by Neptune scattering, some of it is moving in.

Lex Fridman (1:18:20.700)

And if you work through the numbers, you kind of, at the end of the day, it has an effect

Konstantin Batygin (1:18:27.420)

on the best fit orbit for Planet Nine itself.

Lex Fridman (1:18:30.060)

So if you realize that the data set that we're observing is not entirely composed of things

Konstantin Batygin (1:18:35.860)

that came out of the solar system, but also things that got reinjected back in, then turns

Lex Fridman (1:18:41.140)

out the best fit Planet Nine is slightly more eccentric.

Konstantin Batygin (1:18:44.140)

That's kind of getting into the weeds.

Konstantin Batygin (1:18:46.540)

The point here is that the existence of Planet Nine itself provides this natural bridge that

Konstantin Batygin (1:18:53.780)

connects an otherwise dormant population of icy debris of the solar system with things

Lex Fridman (1:18:58.580)

that we're starting to directly observe.

Lex Fridman (1:19:00.180)

So it can flow back, so it's not just a river flowing one way, it's maybe a smaller stream

Lex Fridman (1:19:04.660)

going back.

Konstantin Batygin (1:19:05.660)

Backwash.

Konstantin Batygin (1:19:06.660)

You want a backwash, you want to incorporate that into the simulations, into your understanding

Konstantin Batygin (1:19:10.880)

of those distant objects when you're trying to make sense of the various observations

Lex Fridman (1:19:15.040)

and so on.

Konstantin Batygin (1:19:16.040)

Exactly.

Lex Fridman (1:19:17.040)

That's fascinating.

Konstantin Batygin (1:19:18.040)

I gotta ask you, some people think that many of the observations that you're describing

Lex Fridman (1:19:24.460)

could be described by a primordial black hole.

Lex Fridman (1:19:28.900)

First, what is a primordial black hole and what do you think about this idea?

Lex Fridman (1:19:33.420)

So primordial black hole is a black hole which is made not through the usual pathway of making

Konstantin Batygin (1:19:39.580)

a black hole, which is that you have a star, which is more massive than 1.4 or so solar

Konstantin Batygin (1:19:48.860)

masses and basically when it runs out of fuel, runs out of its nuclear fusion fuel, it can't

Lex Fridman (1:19:56.700)

hold itself up anymore and just the whole thing collapses on itself, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:20:01.740)

You create a, I mean one, I guess, simple way to think about it is you create an object

Konstantin Batygin (1:20:09.100)

with zero radius, that has mass but zero radius, that singularity.

Lex Fridman (1:20:16.500)

Now such black holes exist all over the place.

Konstantin Batygin (1:20:20.020)

In the galaxy, there's in fact a really big one at the center of the galaxy that's like,

Konstantin Batygin (1:20:25.980)

that one's always looking at you when you're not looking, okay, and it's always talking

Konstantin Batygin (1:20:31.100)

about you.

Lex Fridman (1:20:32.100)

And when you turn off the lights, it wakes up.

Konstantin Batygin (1:20:34.940)

That's right.

Lex Fridman (1:20:37.600)

So such black holes are all over the place.

Konstantin Batygin (1:20:40.580)

When they merge, we get to see incredible gravitational waves that they emit, etc, etc.

Konstantin Batygin (1:20:45.700)

One kind of plausible scenario, however, is that when the universe was forming, basically

Konstantin Batygin (1:20:50.780)

during the Big Bang, you created a whole spectrum of black holes, some with masses of five Earth

Konstantin Batygin (1:20:59.740)

masses, some with masses of 10 Earth masses, like the entire, you know, mass spectrum size,

Konstantin Batygin (1:21:05.700)

some the massive asteroids.

Konstantin Batygin (1:21:08.940)

Now on the smaller end, over the lifetime of the universe, the smaller ones kind of

Konstantin Batygin (1:21:14.340)

evaporate and they're not there anymore.

Lex Fridman (1:21:16.780)

At least this is what we, what the calculations tell us.

Lex Fridman (1:21:21.500)

But five Earth masses is big enough to not have evaporated.

Lex Fridman (1:21:25.060)

So one idea is that Planet Nine is not a planet and instead it is a five Earth mass black

Konstantin Batygin (1:21:33.500)

hole.

Lex Fridman (1:21:34.980)

And that's why it's hard to find.

Lex Fridman (1:21:37.020)

Now can we right away from our calculations say that's definitely true or that's not true?

Lex Fridman (1:21:45.260)

Absolutely not.

Konstantin Batygin (1:21:46.260)

We can't, in fact, our calculations tell you nothing other than the orbit and the mass.

Lex Fridman (1:21:53.700)

And that means the black hole, I mean, it could be a five Earth mass, you know, cup.

Konstantin Batygin (1:21:59.760)

It could be a five Earth mass hedgehog or a black hole or really anything that's five

Konstantin Batygin (1:22:04.660)

Earth masses will do because the gravity of a black hole is no different than the gravity

Lex Fridman (1:22:10.220)

of a planet, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:22:11.740)

If the sun became a black hole tomorrow, it would be dark, but the Earth would keep orbiting

Konstantin Batygin (1:22:17.660)

it.

Lex Fridman (1:22:18.660)

And like this notion that, oh, black holes suck everything in, it's not, that's like

Konstantin Batygin (1:22:23.300)

a sci fi notion.

Lex Fridman (1:22:24.300)

All right.

Konstantin Batygin (1:22:25.300)

It's just mass.

Lex Fridman (1:22:26.300)

What would be the difference between a black hole and a planet in terms of observationally?

Lex Fridman (1:22:32.780)

Probably the difference would be that you will never find the black hole, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:22:37.180)

The truth is they're kind of, I'm actually not, you know, I never looked into this very

Konstantin Batygin (1:22:43.060)

carefully, but there are some constraints that you can get just statistically and say,

Konstantin Batygin (1:22:49.740)

okay, if the sun has a binary companion, which is a five Earth mass black hole, then that

Konstantin Batygin (1:22:56.060)

means such black holes would be extremely common and, you know, you can sort of look

Lex Fridman (1:23:01.500)

for lensing events and then you say, okay, maybe that's not so likely.

Lex Fridman (1:23:05.260)

But you know, that said, I want to emphasize that there's a limit to what our calculations

Lex Fridman (1:23:12.120)

can tell you.

Konstantin Batygin (1:23:13.120)

That's the orbit and the mass.

Lex Fridman (1:23:14.680)

So I think there's a bunch, like Ed Witten, I think wishes it's a black hole because I

Konstantin Batygin (1:23:20.900)

think one exciting things about black holes in our solar system is that we could go there

Lex Fridman (1:23:26.580)

and we can maybe study the singularity somehow because that allows us to understand some

Konstantin Batygin (1:23:31.060)

fundamental things about physics.

Konstantin Batygin (1:23:33.340)

If it's a planet, so planet nine, we may not, you know, and we go there, we may not discover

Konstantin Batygin (1:23:39.840)

anything profoundly new.

Konstantin Batygin (1:23:43.220)

The interesting thing, perhaps you can correct me about planet nine is like the big picture

Konstantin Batygin (1:23:47.620)

of it.

Lex Fridman (1:23:48.620)

The whole big story of the Kuiper belt and all those kinds of things.

Konstantin Batygin (1:23:52.260)

It's not that planet nine would be somehow fundamentally different from, I don't know,

Lex Fridman (1:23:58.900)

Neptune in terms of, in terms of the kind of things we could learn from it.

Lex Fridman (1:24:03.700)

So I think that there's kind of a hope that it's a black hole because it's an entirely

Lex Fridman (1:24:07.580)

new kind of object.

Konstantin Batygin (1:24:09.020)

Maybe you can correct me on that.

Lex Fridman (1:24:11.020)

Yeah.

Konstantin Batygin (1:24:12.020)

I mean, of course here, my own biases creep in because I'm interested, you know, in planets

Lex Fridman (1:24:18.060)

around other stars.

Lex Fridman (1:24:19.960)

And I would say, I would disagree that, you know, we wouldn't find things that would be

Konstantin Batygin (1:24:26.060)

truly, you know, fundamentally new because as it turns out, the galaxy is really good

Lex Fridman (1:24:33.680)

at making five or three earth mass objects, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:24:38.620)

The most common type of planet that we see, that we, you know, discover orbiting around

Konstantin Batygin (1:24:45.160)

other stars is a few earth masses.

Lex Fridman (1:24:47.800)

In the solar system, there's no analog for that, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:24:50.020)

We go from one earth mass object, which is this one and to skipping to Neptune and Uranus,

Konstantin Batygin (1:24:56.020)

which themselves are actually relatively poorly understood, especially Uranus from the interior

Konstantin Batygin (1:25:01.280)

structure point of view.

Konstantin Batygin (1:25:03.920)

If planet nine is a planet, going there will give us the closest window into understanding

Lex Fridman (1:25:09.520)

what other planets look like.

Lex Fridman (1:25:12.220)

And I will, you know, I'll say this, that, you know, planets kind of in terms of their

Lex Fridman (1:25:18.860)

complexity on some logarithmic scale fall somewhere between a star and an insect, right?

Lex Fridman (1:25:26.020)

An insect is way more complicated than a star, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:25:30.940)

Just all kinds of physical processes and really biochemical processes that occur inside of

Konstantin Batygin (1:25:37.240)

an insect that just make a star look like, you know, somebody is like playing with a

Lex Fridman (1:25:43.800)

spring or something, right?

Lex Fridman (1:25:45.500)

So the, I think, you know, it would be, you know, arguably, you know, more interesting

Konstantin Batygin (1:25:53.580)

to go to, you know, to go to planet nine if it's a planet, because black holes are simple.

Lex Fridman (1:25:59.380)

They're just kind of, they're basically macroscopic like particles, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:26:04.500)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:26:05.500)

And so just like a star that you mentioned in terms of complexity.

Lex Fridman (1:26:08.060)

So it's possible that planet nine is supposed to being like homogeneous is like super like

Konstantin Batygin (1:26:14.100)

heterogeneous is a bunch of cool stuff going on that could give us an intuition.

Konstantin Batygin (1:26:18.220)

I never thought about that, that it's basically Earth number two in terms of size and gives

Konstantin Batygin (1:26:24.580)

us, starts giving us intuition that could be generalizable to Earth like planets elsewhere

Konstantin Batygin (1:26:30.500)

in the galaxy.

Lex Fridman (1:26:31.500)

I mean, yeah, Pluto is also in the sense like, you know, Pluto is a tiny, tiny thing, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:26:37.220)

Just like you would imagine that it's just a tiny ball of ice, like who cares, but the

Lex Fridman (1:26:41.380)

New Horizons images of Pluto reveal so much remarkable structure, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:26:47.260)

They reveal glaciers flowing and these are glaciers not made out of water ice, but you

Konstantin Batygin (1:26:51.860)

know, CO ice, it turns out at those temperatures, right, of like 40 or so Kelvin, water ice

Lex Fridman (1:27:00.340)

looks like metal, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:27:01.340)

It just doesn't flow at all, but then ice made up of carbon monoxide starts to flow.

Konstantin Batygin (1:27:07.380)

I mean, there's just like all kinds of really cool phenomena that you otherwise just wouldn't

Lex Fridman (1:27:14.180)

really even imagine that occur.

Lex Fridman (1:27:17.180)

So yeah, I mean, there's a reason why I like planets.

Konstantin Batygin (1:27:20.620)

Well, let me ask you, I find as I read the idea that Ed Witten was thinking about this

Konstantin Batygin (1:27:28.720)

kind of stuff fascinating.

Lex Fridman (1:27:30.060)

So he's a mathematical physicist who's very interested in string theory, won the Fields

Konstantin Batygin (1:27:37.420)

Medal for his work in mathematics.

Lex Fridman (1:27:41.460)

So I read that he proposed a fleet of probes accelerated by radiation pressure that could

Konstantin Batygin (1:27:47.260)

discover a Planet Nine primordial black holes location.

Lex Fridman (1:27:50.580)

What do you think about this idea of sending a bunch of probes out there?

Lex Fridman (1:27:55.980)

Yeah, look, the way the idea is a cool one, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:28:00.820)

You go and you say, you know, launch them basically, isotropically, you track where

Konstantin Batygin (1:28:06.920)

they go.

Lex Fridman (1:28:07.920)

And if I understand the idea correctly, basically measure the deflection and you say, okay,

Konstantin Batygin (1:28:15.260)

that must be something there since the probe trajectories are being altered.

Konstantin Batygin (1:28:21.620)

Oh, so the measurement, the basic sensory mechanism is the, it's not like you have senses

Konstantin Batygin (1:28:26.420)

on the probes.

Konstantin Batygin (1:28:27.420)

It's more like you're, because you're very precisely able to capture, to measure the

Konstantin Batygin (1:28:32.300)

trajectory of the probes, you can then infer the gravitational fields.

Lex Fridman (1:28:35.780)

I think that's the basic idea.

Konstantin Batygin (1:28:39.960)

You know, back a few years ago, we had conversations like these with, you know, engineers from

Lex Fridman (1:28:46.500)

JPL.

Konstantin Batygin (1:28:47.960)

They more or less convinced me that this is more, much more difficult than it seems because

Lex Fridman (1:28:55.120)

you don't, at that level of precision, right?

Lex Fridman (1:28:58.820)

Things like solar flares matter, right?

Lex Fridman (1:29:00.980)

Solar flares, right, are completely chaotic.

Konstantin Batygin (1:29:03.740)

You can't predict which, where a solar flare will happen.

Lex Fridman (1:29:07.260)

That will drive radiation pressure gradients.

Konstantin Batygin (1:29:10.580)

You don't know where every single asteroid is.

Lex Fridman (1:29:12.640)

So like actually doing that problem, I think it's possible, but it's not a trivial matter,

Lex Fridman (1:29:20.900)

right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:29:21.900)

Well, I wonder, not just about Planet 9, I wonder if that's kind of the future of doing

Konstantin Batygin (1:29:28.380)

science in our solar system is to just launch a huge number of probes.

Lex Fridman (1:29:33.420)

So like a whole order of magnitude, many orders of magnitude, larger numbers of probes, and

Konstantin Batygin (1:29:39.820)

then starting for a bunch of different stuff, not just gravity, but everything else.

Lex Fridman (1:29:44.620)

So in this regard, I actually think there is a huge revolution that's to some extent

Lex Fridman (1:29:50.420)

already started, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:29:52.100)

The standard kind of like timescale for a NASA mission is that you like propose it and

Konstantin Batygin (1:29:57.740)

it launches, I don't know, like 150 years after your proposal.

Konstantin Batygin (1:30:01.980)

I'm over exaggerating, but you know, it's just like some huge development cycle and

Lex Fridman (1:30:08.860)

it gets delayed 55 times, like that is not going away, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:30:15.900)

The really cutting edge things, you have to do it this way because you don't know what

Konstantin Batygin (1:30:20.340)

you're building, so to speak.

Lex Fridman (1:30:22.300)

But the CubeSat kind of world is starting to provide an avenue for like launching something

Konstantin Batygin (1:30:32.040)

that costs a few million dollars and has a turnaround timescale of like a couple of years.

Konstantin Batygin (1:30:37.980)

You can imagine doing PhD theses where you design the mission, the mission goes to where

Konstantin Batygin (1:30:44.260)

you're going, and you do the science all within a time span of five, six years.

Konstantin Batygin (1:30:49.520)

That has not been fully executed on yet, but I absolutely think that's on the horizon and

Konstantin Batygin (1:30:56.220)

we're not talking a decade, I think we're talking like this decade.

Konstantin Batygin (1:30:59.980)

Yeah, and the company is accelerating all this with Blue Origin and SpaceX, and there's

Konstantin Batygin (1:31:07.660)

a bunch of more CubeSat oriented companies that are pushing this forward.

Lex Fridman (1:31:12.380)

Well let me ask you on that topic, what do you think about either one?

Konstantin Batygin (1:31:17.740)

Elon Musk with SpaceX going to Mars, I think he wants SpaceX to be the first to put a first

Konstantin Batygin (1:31:24.420)

human on Mars, and then Jeff Bezos, gotta give him props, wants to be the first to fly

Konstantin Batygin (1:31:33.380)

his own rocket out into space.

Lex Fridman (1:31:38.060)

Wasn't there a guy who like built his rocket out of garbage?

Konstantin Batygin (1:31:43.020)

This was like a couple years ago, and somewhere in the desert he launched himself.

Konstantin Batygin (1:31:47.580)

I'm not tracking this closely, but I think I am familiar with folks who built their own

Konstantin Batygin (1:31:52.340)

rocket to try to prove the earth is flat.

Lex Fridman (1:31:54.660)

Yes, that's the guy I'm talking about, he also jumped some limousine.

Konstantin Batygin (1:32:00.540)

Truly revolutionary mind, you have to have greater men than either you or I.

Konstantin Batygin (1:32:09.940)

It's been astonishing to watch how really over the last decade the commercial sector

Konstantin Batygin (1:32:17.380)

took over this industry that traditionally has really been a government thing to do.

Konstantin Batygin (1:32:27.740)

Motivated primarily by the competition between nations, like the Cold War, and now it's motivated

Konstantin Batygin (1:32:34.020)

more and more by the natural forces of capitalism.

Lex Fridman (1:32:39.380)

That's right, so here I have many ideas about it.

Konstantin Batygin (1:32:43.860)

I think on the one hand, like what SpaceX has been able to do, for example, phenomenal.

Konstantin Batygin (1:32:51.780)

If that brings down the price of space exploration, that turnaround time scale for space exploration,

Konstantin Batygin (1:32:57.980)

which I think it inevitably will, that's a huge boost to the human condition.

Konstantin Batygin (1:33:06.580)

The same time, if we're talking astronomy, it comes at a huge cost, and the Starlink

Konstantin Batygin (1:33:14.220)

satellites is a great example of that cost.

Konstantin Batygin (1:33:16.660)

In fact, I was just camping in the Mojave with a friend of mine, and they saw this string

Konstantin Batygin (1:33:26.480)

of satellites just kind of appear and then disappear into nowhere.

Konstantin Batygin (1:33:32.780)

That is beginning to interfere with Earth based observations, so I think there's tremendous

Konstantin Batygin (1:33:39.860)

potential there, it's also important to be responsible about how it's executed.

Konstantin Batygin (1:33:45.020)

Now with Mars and the whole idea of exploring Mars, I don't have strong opinions on whether

Konstantin Batygin (1:33:53.520)

a manned mission is required or not required, but I do think the thing to keep in mind is

Konstantin Batygin (1:34:05.260)

that I'm not signed on, if you will, to the idea that Mars is some kind of a safe haven

Konstantin Batygin (1:34:13.260)

that we can escape to.

Lex Fridman (1:34:17.980)

Mars sucks.

Konstantin Batygin (1:34:19.780)

Living on Mars, if you want to live on Mars, you can have that experience by going to the

Lex Fridman (1:34:26.420)

Mojave Desert and camping, and it's just not a great experience.

Konstantin Batygin (1:34:31.780)

Well it's interesting, but there's something captivating about that kind of mission of

Konstantin Batygin (1:34:35.500)

us striving out into space, and by making Mars in some ways habitable for at least like

Konstantin Batygin (1:34:43.940)

months at a time, I think would lead to engineering breakthroughs that would make life in many

Lex Fridman (1:34:51.100)

ways much better on Earth.

Konstantin Batygin (1:34:52.500)

It will come up with ideas we totally don't expect yet, both on the robotics side, on

Konstantin Batygin (1:34:58.180)

the food engineering side, on the, maybe we'll switch from, there'll be huge breakthroughs

Konstantin Batygin (1:35:06.540)

in insect farming, as exciting as I find that idea to be, in the ways we consume protein.

Konstantin Batygin (1:35:14.860)

Maybe it'll revolutionize, we do factory farming, which is full of cruelty and torture of animals,

Konstantin Batygin (1:35:22.140)

we'll revolutionize that completely because of our, we shouldn't need to go to Mars to

Konstantin Batygin (1:35:27.820)

revolutionize life here on Earth, but at the same time, I shouldn't need a deadline to

Konstantin Batygin (1:35:32.580)

get shit done, but I do need it.

Lex Fridman (1:35:35.100)

And then in the same way, I think we need Mars.

Konstantin Batygin (1:35:37.580)

There's something about the human spirit that loves that longing for exploration.

Konstantin Batygin (1:35:41.060)

I agree with that thesis, the going to the moon, right, and that whole endeavor has captivated

Konstantin Batygin (1:35:51.900)

the imagination of so many, and it has led to incredible ideas, really, and probably

Konstantin Batygin (1:35:59.780)

in nonlinear ways, not like, okay, we went to the moon, therefore some person here has

Konstantin Batygin (1:36:05.420)

thought of this.

Konstantin Batygin (1:36:07.180)

In that similar sense, I think space exploration is, there's some real magnetism about it,

Lex Fridman (1:36:15.760)

and it's on a genetic level.

Konstantin Batygin (1:36:17.680)

We have this need to keep exploring when we're done with a certain frontier, we move on to

Konstantin Batygin (1:36:25.460)

the next frontier.

Konstantin Batygin (1:36:26.460)

All that I'm saying is that I'm not moving to Mars to live there permanently ever, and

Konstantin Batygin (1:36:32.860)

I think that, I'm glad you noted the kind of degradation of the Earth.

Lex Fridman (1:36:39.540)

I think that is a true kind of the leading order challenge of our time.

Konstantin Batygin (1:36:44.620)

That's a great engineering, that's a bunch of engineering problems.

Konstantin Batygin (1:36:48.180)

I'm most interested in space, because as I've read extensively, it's apparently very difficult

Konstantin Batygin (1:36:53.980)

to have sex in space, and so I just want that problem to be solved, because I think once

Konstantin Batygin (1:36:59.020)

we solve the sex in space problem, we'll revolutionize sex here on Earth, thereby increasing the

Konstantin Batygin (1:37:04.620)

fun on Earth, and the consequences of that can only be good.

Lex Fridman (1:37:08.980)

I mean, you can, you've got a clear plan, right, and it sounds like, you know.

Konstantin Batygin (1:37:14.220)

I'm submitting proposals to NASA as we speak.

Lex Fridman (1:37:16.420)

That's right.

Konstantin Batygin (1:37:17.420)

I keep getting rejected, I don't know why.

Lex Fridman (1:37:21.020)

Okay.

Konstantin Batygin (1:37:22.020)

You need better diagrams.

Lex Fridman (1:37:24.460)

Better pictures.

Konstantin Batygin (1:37:25.460)

I should have thought of that.

Konstantin Batygin (1:37:26.660)

You a while ago mentioned that, you know, there's certain aspects in the history of

Konstantin Batygin (1:37:30.980)

the solar system and Earth that resulted, it could have resulted in an opaque atmosphere,

Lex Fridman (1:37:38.260)

but it didn't, we couldn't see the stars.

Lex Fridman (1:37:43.100)

And somebody mentioned to me a little bit ago, and it's almost like a philosophical

Lex Fridman (1:37:47.580)

question for you.

Lex Fridman (1:37:49.320)

Do you think humans, like human society would develop as it did, or at all, if we couldn't

Lex Fridman (1:37:58.700)

see the stars?

Konstantin Batygin (1:37:59.940)

It would be drastically different.

Lex Fridman (1:38:03.060)

Just if it ever did develop.

Lex Fridman (1:38:05.260)

So I think some of the early developments, right, of like, you know, fire, you know.

Konstantin Batygin (1:38:12.540)

First of all, that atmosphere would be so hot, because, you know, if you have an opaque

Konstantin Batygin (1:38:16.020)

atmosphere, the temperature at the bottom is huge.

Lex Fridman (1:38:22.260)

So we would be very different beings to start with.

Konstantin Batygin (1:38:25.860)

We'd have very different.

Lex Fridman (1:38:26.860)

It could be cloudy in certain kinds of ways that you could still get.

Konstantin Batygin (1:38:29.420)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (1:38:30.420)

Think about like a greenhouse, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:38:32.380)

A greenhouse is cloudy, effectively, but it's super hot.

Lex Fridman (1:38:37.780)

Yeah.

Konstantin Batygin (1:38:38.780)

It's hard to avoid having an atmosphere.

Lex Fridman (1:38:41.300)

If you have an opaque atmosphere, it's hard to, right.

Lex Fridman (1:38:44.620)

Venus is a great example, right?

Lex Fridman (1:38:46.580)

Venus is, I don't remember exactly how many degrees, but it's hundreds in Celsius, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:38:52.940)

It's not a hundred, it's hundreds.

Konstantin Batygin (1:38:55.460)

Even though it's only a little bit closer to the sun, that temperature is entirely coming

Konstantin Batygin (1:38:59.740)

from the fact that the atmosphere is thick.

Lex Fridman (1:39:01.820)

So it's just a sauna of sorts.

Konstantin Batygin (1:39:03.580)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:39:04.580)

Yeah.

Konstantin Batygin (1:39:05.580)

You go there, you know, you feel refreshed after you come back, you know.

Lex Fridman (1:39:08.740)

But if you stay there, I mean, so, okay, take that as an assumption.

Konstantin Batygin (1:39:13.060)

This is a philosophical question, not a biological one.

Lex Fridman (1:39:15.500)

So you have a life that develops under these extremely hot conditions.

Konstantin Batygin (1:39:18.980)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:39:19.980)

So let's see.

Lex Fridman (1:39:20.980)

So much of the early evolution of mankind was driven by exploration, right?

Lex Fridman (1:39:28.620)

And the kind of interest in stars originated in part as a tool to guide that exploration,

Lex Fridman (1:39:37.060)

right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:39:38.060)

I mean, that in itself, I think would be a huge, you know, a huge differential in the

Konstantin Batygin (1:39:44.420)

way that we, you know, our evolution on this planet.

Lex Fridman (1:39:48.700)

Yeah.

Konstantin Batygin (1:39:49.700)

I mean, stars, that's brilliant.

Lex Fridman (1:39:51.560)

So even in that aspect, but even in further aspects, astronomy just shows up in basically

Konstantin Batygin (1:39:59.360)

every single development in the history of science up until the 20th century, it shows

Lex Fridman (1:40:04.420)

up.

Lex Fridman (1:40:05.500)

So I wonder without that, if we would have, if we would even get like calculus.

Lex Fridman (1:40:10.340)

Yeah, look, that's a great, I mean, that's a great point.

Konstantin Batygin (1:40:14.780)

Newton in part developed calculus because he was interested in understanding, explaining

Lex Fridman (1:40:20.540)

Kepler's laws, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:40:22.580)

In general, that whole mechanistic understanding of the night sky, right, replacing a religious

Konstantin Batygin (1:40:29.300)

understanding where you interpret, you know, this is, you know, this whatever fire god

Konstantin Batygin (1:40:34.220)

riding his, you know, a little chariot across the sky, as opposed to, you know, this is

Konstantin Batygin (1:40:41.060)

some mechanistic set of laws that transformed humanity and arguably put us on the course

Lex Fridman (1:40:48.460)

that we're on today, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:40:50.540)

The entirety of the last 400 years and the development of kind of our technological world

Lex Fridman (1:40:57.140)

that we live in today was sparked by that, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:41:03.500)

Understanding an effectively, you know, a non secular view of the natural world and

Konstantin Batygin (1:41:08.900)

kind of saying, okay, this can be understood and if it can be understood, it can be utilized,

Lex Fridman (1:41:15.860)

we can create our own variants of this.

Konstantin Batygin (1:41:19.140)

Absolutely, we would be a very, very different species without astronomy.

Lex Fridman (1:41:24.660)

This I think extends beyond just astronomy, right?

Lex Fridman (1:41:29.100)

There are questions like why do we need to spend money on X, right?

Lex Fridman (1:41:35.180)

Where X can be anything like paleontology, like, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:41:39.860)

The mating patterns of penguins.

Lex Fridman (1:41:42.340)

Yeah, that's like, that's right.

Konstantin Batygin (1:41:46.460)

I think, you know, there's a tremendous under appreciation for the usefulness of useless

Lex Fridman (1:41:53.540)

knowledge, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:41:54.540)

I mean, that's brilliant.

Konstantin Batygin (1:41:57.540)

I didn't come up with this, this is a little book by the guy who started the Institute

Konstantin Batygin (1:42:02.820)

for Advanced Studies, but, you know, it's so true, so much of the electronics that are

Lex Fridman (1:42:10.500)

on this table, right, work on Maxwell's equations.

Konstantin Batygin (1:42:13.900)

Maxwell wasn't sitting around in the 1800s saying, you know, I hope one day, you know,

Konstantin Batygin (1:42:21.300)

we'll make, you know, a couple mics so, you know, a couple, you know, a couple guys can

Lex Fridman (1:42:27.460)

have this conversation, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:42:30.780)

That wasn't at no point was that the motivation, and yet, you know, it gave us the world that

Konstantin Batygin (1:42:38.820)

we have today.

Konstantin Batygin (1:42:39.980)

The answer is if you are a purely pragmatic person, if you don't care at all about kind

Konstantin Batygin (1:42:45.380)

of the human condition, none of this, the answer is, you can tax it, right, like, useless

Lex Fridman (1:42:53.780)

things have created way more capital than useful things.

Lex Fridman (1:43:00.900)

And the sad thing, first of all, it's really important to think about, and it's brilliant

Konstantin Batygin (1:43:08.300)

in the following context, like Neil deGrasse Tyson has this book about the role of military

Konstantin Batygin (1:43:13.820)

based funding in the development of science, and then so much of technological breakthroughs

Lex Fridman (1:43:21.420)

in the 20th century had to do with humans working on different military things.

Lex Fridman (1:43:28.460)

And then the outcome of that had nothing to do with military, it had some military application,

Lex Fridman (1:43:32.660)

but their impact was much, much bigger than military.

Konstantin Batygin (1:43:36.820)

The splitting of the atom is a kind of a canonical example of this.

Konstantin Batygin (1:43:41.600)

We all know the tragedy that, you know, arises from splitting of the atom, and yet, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:43:47.860)

so much, I mean, the atom itself does not care for what purpose it is being split.

Lex Fridman (1:43:55.420)

So I wonder if we took the same amount of funding as we used for war and poured it into

Konstantin Batygin (1:44:02.140)

like totally seemingly useless things, like the mating patterns of penguins, we would

Lex Fridman (1:44:06.980)

get the internet anyway.

Konstantin Batygin (1:44:08.500)

I think so, I think so, and, you know, perhaps more of the internet would have penguins,

Lex Fridman (1:44:16.500)

you know.

Lex Fridman (1:44:17.500)

So we're both joking, but in some sense, like, I wonder, it's not the penguins, because penguins

Konstantin Batygin (1:44:23.420)

is more about sort of biology, but all useless kind of tinkering and all kinds of avenues,

Lex Fridman (1:44:32.900)

and also because military applications are often burdened by the secrecy required.

Lex Fridman (1:44:40.160)

So it's often like so much, the openness is lacking, and if we've learned anything for

Konstantin Batygin (1:44:46.980)

the last few decades is that when there's openness in science, that accelerates the

Lex Fridman (1:44:52.580)

development of science.

Konstantin Batygin (1:44:53.740)

That's right.

Lex Fridman (1:44:54.740)

That's true.

Konstantin Batygin (1:44:55.740)

That openness of science truly, you know, it benefits everybody, the notion that if,

Konstantin Batygin (1:45:02.540)

you know, I share my science with you, then you're going to catch up and like know the

Konstantin Batygin (1:45:07.260)

same thing.

Konstantin Batygin (1:45:08.900)

That is a short sighted viewpoint, because if you catch up and you open, you know, you

Lex Fridman (1:45:16.180)

discover something that puts me in a position to do the next step, right?

Lex Fridman (1:45:21.140)

So I absolutely agree with all of this.

Konstantin Batygin (1:45:25.740)

I mean, the kind of question of like military funding versus non military funding is obviously

Konstantin Batygin (1:45:32.740)

a complicated one, but at the end of the day, I think we have to get over the notion as

Lex Fridman (1:45:39.820)

a society that we are going to, you know, pay for this, and then we will get that, right?

Lex Fridman (1:45:47.900)

That's true if you're buying like, I don't know, toilet paper or something, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:45:53.260)

It's just not true in the intellectual pursuit.

Lex Fridman (1:45:55.680)

That's not how it works, and sometimes it'll fail, right?

Lex Fridman (1:46:00.460)

Like sometimes, like a huge fraction of what I do, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:46:04.020)

I come up with an idea, I think, oh, it's great, and then I work it out, it's totally

Lex Fridman (1:46:07.620)

not great, right?

Lex Fridman (1:46:08.820)

It fails immediately.

Konstantin Batygin (1:46:10.700)

Failure is not a sign that the initial pursuit was worthless, so failure is just part of

Konstantin Batygin (1:46:16.140)

this kind of this whole exploration thing, and we should fund more and more of this exploration,

Konstantin Batygin (1:46:21.060)

the variety of the exploration.

Lex Fridman (1:46:22.060)

That's right.

Konstantin Batygin (1:46:23.060)

I think it was Linus Pauling or somebody from, you know, that generation of scientists, you

Lex Fridman (1:46:28.220)

know, a good way to have good ideas is to have a lot of ideas.

Konstantin Batygin (1:46:33.460)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:46:34.460)

So I think that's true.

Konstantin Batygin (1:46:37.080)

If you are conservative in your thinking, if you worry about proposing something that's

Konstantin Batygin (1:46:42.100)

going to fail and, oh, what if, you know, like, there's no science police that's going

Konstantin Batygin (1:46:48.220)

to come and arrest you for proposing the wrong thing, and, you know, it's also just like,

Lex Fridman (1:46:54.060)

why would you do science if you're afraid of, you know, taking that step?

Konstantin Batygin (1:47:01.020)

It'd be so much better to propose things that are plausible, that are interesting, and then

Konstantin Batygin (1:47:07.140)

for a fraction of them to be wrong than to just kind of, you know, make incremental progress

Lex Fridman (1:47:11.660)

all your life, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:47:13.660)

Speaking of wild ideas, let me ask you about the thing we mentioned previously, which is

Konstantin Batygin (1:47:19.060)

this interstellar object Amuamua.

Lex Fridman (1:47:22.940)

Could it be space junk from a distant alien civilization?

Konstantin Batygin (1:47:27.400)

You can't immediately discount that by saying absolutely it cannot.

Lex Fridman (1:47:33.940)

Anything can be space junk.

Lex Fridman (1:47:34.940)

I mean, from that point of view, can any of the Kuiper Belt objects we see be space junk?

Lex Fridman (1:47:41.300)

Everything on the night sky can, in principle, be space junk.

Lex Fridman (1:47:44.940)

And Kuiper Belt would catch interstellar objects potentially and, like, force them into an

Lex Fridman (1:47:49.700)

orbit if they're, like, small enough?

Konstantin Batygin (1:47:52.100)

Not the Kuiper Belt itself, but you can imagine, like, Jupiter family comets being captured,

Lex Fridman (1:47:57.300)

you know.

Lex Fridman (1:47:58.300)

So you can actually capture things.

Konstantin Batygin (1:48:00.840)

It's even easier to do this very early in the solar system, like, early in the solar

Konstantin Batygin (1:48:05.220)

system's life while it's still in a cluster of stars.

Konstantin Batygin (1:48:09.420)

It's unavoidable that you capture debris, whether it be natural debris or unnatural

Konstantin Batygin (1:48:15.700)

debris, or just debris of some kind from other stars.

Lex Fridman (1:48:20.900)

It's like a daycare center, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:48:22.460)

Like, everybody passes their infections on to other kids.

Lex Fridman (1:48:25.700)

Yeah.

Konstantin Batygin (1:48:26.700)

You know, Amuamua, there's been a lot of discussion about it, and there's been a lot of interest

Lex Fridman (1:48:31.940)

in this over, like, is it aliens or is it not?

Konstantin Batygin (1:48:35.140)

It's, like, if you just kind of look at the facts, like, what we know about it is it's

Lex Fridman (1:48:39.460)

kind of, like, a weird shape, and it also accelerated, you know?

Lex Fridman (1:48:44.380)

Right?

Lex Fridman (1:48:45.380)

Like, that's the two, those are the two interesting things about it.

Konstantin Batygin (1:48:50.820)

There are puzzles about it, and perhaps the most daring resolution to this puzzle is that

Konstantin Batygin (1:49:02.460)

it's not, you know, aliens or it's not, like, a rock, it's actually a piece of hydrogen

Konstantin Batygin (1:49:07.380)

ice.

Lex Fridman (1:49:08.380)

Right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:49:09.380)

So, this is a friend of mine, you know, Daryl Seligman, Greg Laughlin, came up with this

Konstantin Batygin (1:49:15.540)

idea that in giant molecular clouds that are just clouds of hydrogen, helium, gas that

Konstantin Batygin (1:49:22.900)

live throughout the galaxy, at their cores, you can condense ice to become these hydrogen,

Lex Fridman (1:49:31.700)

you know, icebergs, if you will.

Lex Fridman (1:49:33.860)

And then that explains many of the aspects of, in fact, I think that explains all of

Konstantin Batygin (1:49:41.620)

the Oumuamua mystery, how it becomes elongated, because basically the hydrogen ice sublimates

Lex Fridman (1:49:48.260)

and kind of like a bar of soap that, you know, slowly kind of elongates as you strip away

Konstantin Batygin (1:49:55.700)

the surface layers, how it was able to accelerate because of a jet that is produced from, you

Konstantin Batygin (1:50:03.140)

know, the hydrogen coming off of it, but you can't see it because it's hydrogen gas, like,

Lex Fridman (1:50:06.820)

all of this stuff kind of falls together nicely.

Konstantin Batygin (1:50:12.620)

I'm intrigued by that idea, truly, because it's like, if that's true, that's a new type

Lex Fridman (1:50:18.520)

of astrophysical object.

Lex Fridman (1:50:21.320)

And it would be produced by, what's the monster that produced it initially, that kind of object?

Lex Fridman (1:50:27.340)

So these giant molecular clouds, they're everywhere.

Konstantin Batygin (1:50:30.380)

I mean, the fact that they exist is not...

Lex Fridman (1:50:34.580)

Are they rogue clouds or are they part of like an Oort cloud?

Konstantin Batygin (1:50:37.540)

No, no, they're rogue clouds.

Lex Fridman (1:50:38.540)

They're just floating about?

Konstantin Batygin (1:50:39.540)

Yeah, so if you go, like, a lot of people imagine the galaxy as being a, you know, a

Lex Fridman (1:50:47.260)

bunch of stars, right, and they're just orbiting, right?

Lex Fridman (1:50:50.860)

But the truth is, if you fly between stars, you run into clouds.

Lex Fridman (1:50:55.260)

They don't have any large object that creates orbits, so they're just floating about?

Konstantin Batygin (1:50:59.480)

Just floating.

Lex Fridman (1:51:00.480)

But why are they floating together?

Konstantin Batygin (1:51:01.480)

Or they just float together for a time and not...

Lex Fridman (1:51:04.140)

Well, so these eventually become the nurseries of stars.

Lex Fridman (1:51:08.880)

So as they cool, they contract and, you know, then collapse into stars or into groups of

Lex Fridman (1:51:15.820)

stars.

Lex Fridman (1:51:16.820)

And some of them, the starless molecular clouds, according to the calculations that Daryl

Lex Fridman (1:51:24.380)

and Greg did, can create these, like, icicles of hydrogen ice.

Konstantin Batygin (1:51:31.180)

I wonder why they would be flying so fast, because they seem to be moving pretty fast

Lex Fridman (1:51:35.980)

at a quick pace.

Lex Fridman (1:51:36.980)

You mean Oumuamua?

Lex Fridman (1:51:37.980)

Oumuamua, yeah.

Konstantin Batygin (1:51:38.980)

Oh, that's just because of the acceleration due to the sun.

Konstantin Batygin (1:51:41.500)

If you stop, it's like, take something really far away, let it go, and the sun is here.

Konstantin Batygin (1:51:48.220)

By the time it comes close to the sun, right, it's moving pretty fast.

Lex Fridman (1:51:52.980)

So that's an attractive explanation, I think, not so much because it's cool, but it makes

Konstantin Batygin (1:51:59.060)

a clear prediction, right, of when Vera Rubin Observatory comes online next year or so.

Lex Fridman (1:52:06.980)

We will discover many, many more of these objects, right?

Lex Fridman (1:52:11.020)

And they have, so I like theories that are falsifiable.

Lex Fridman (1:52:17.380)

Not just testable, but falsifiable.

Konstantin Batygin (1:52:19.380)

It's good to have a falsifiable theory where you can say, that's not true.

Lex Fridman (1:52:24.980)

Aliens is one that's fundamentally difficult to say, no, that's not aliens.

Konstantin Batygin (1:52:29.820)

Well, the interesting thing to me, if you look at one alien civilization, and then we

Konstantin Batygin (1:52:35.900)

look at the things it produces, in terms of if we were to try to detect the alien civilization,

Konstantin Batygin (1:52:43.380)

there is like, say there's 10 billion aliens, there would probably be trillions of dumb

Konstantin Batygin (1:52:55.300)

drone type things produced by the aliens, and then be many, many, many more orders of

Konstantin Batygin (1:53:01.380)

magnitude of junk.

Lex Fridman (1:53:04.600)

So if you were to look for an alien civilization, in my mind, you would be looking for the junk.

Konstantin Batygin (1:53:09.900)

That's the more efficient thing to look for.

Lex Fridman (1:53:12.340)

So I'm not saying Oumuamua has any characteristics of space junk, but it kind of opened my eyes

Konstantin Batygin (1:53:19.100)

to the idea that we shouldn't necessarily be looking to the queen of the ant colony.

Konstantin Batygin (1:53:25.520)

We should be looking at, I don't know, I don't know, traces of alien life that doesn't look

Konstantin Batygin (1:53:32.020)

intelligent in any way, may not even look like life.

Lex Fridman (1:53:35.180)

It could be just garbage.

Konstantin Batygin (1:53:36.380)

We should be looking for garbage.

Lex Fridman (1:53:39.660)

Just generically.

Konstantin Batygin (1:53:40.660)

Well, garbage that's producible by unnatural forces.

Konstantin Batygin (1:53:47.420)

For me at least, that was kind of interesting, because if you have a successful alien civilization,

Konstantin Batygin (1:53:53.160)

that we will be producing many more orders of magnitude of junk, and that would be easier

Lex Fridman (1:53:57.180)

potentially to detect.

Konstantin Batygin (1:53:58.500)

Well, so you have to produce the junk, but you have to also launch it.

Lex Fridman (1:54:02.260)

So this is the, this is where, I mean, let's, let's imagine.

Konstantin Batygin (1:54:05.620)

Garbage disposal.

Lex Fridman (1:54:06.620)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:54:07.620)

But let's imagine we are a successful civilization that, you know, has made it to space.

Lex Fridman (1:54:13.100)

We clearly have, right?

Lex Fridman (1:54:15.420)

And yes, we're in the infancy of that pursuit, but, you know, we've launched, I don't know

Lex Fridman (1:54:20.620)

how many satellites.

Konstantin Batygin (1:54:24.000)

If you count GPS satellites, it must be at least thousands.

Lex Fridman (1:54:29.220)

It's certainly thousands.

Konstantin Batygin (1:54:30.220)

I don't know if it's over 10,000, but it's on that order.

Lex Fridman (1:54:32.460)

But it's on that, like a large order of magnitude.

Lex Fridman (1:54:35.000)

How many of the things that we've launched will ever leave the solar system?

Lex Fridman (1:54:39.500)

I think two.

Konstantin Batygin (1:54:40.500)

Two so far.

Lex Fridman (1:54:41.500)

Well, maybe the Voyager, the Voyager 1, Voyager 2, I don't know if the Pioneer.

Lex Fridman (1:54:46.940)

So maybe three.

Lex Fridman (1:54:47.940)

Oh, there's also a Tesla Roadster out there.

Konstantin Batygin (1:54:52.140)

That one, it will never leave the solar system.

Lex Fridman (1:54:54.180)

It'll just, I think that one will eventually collide with Mars.

Konstantin Batygin (1:54:57.420)

That can be SpaceX's first Mars destination.

Lex Fridman (1:55:02.500)

But look, so there's an energetic cost to interstellar travel, which is really hard

Konstantin Batygin (1:55:08.460)

to overcome.

Lex Fridman (1:55:09.740)

And when we think about, you know, generically, what do we look for in an alien civilization,

Konstantin Batygin (1:55:15.500)

oftentimes we tend to imagine that the thing you look for is the thing that we're doing

Lex Fridman (1:55:20.300)

right now.

Konstantin Batygin (1:55:21.300)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:55:22.300)

Right?

Lex Fridman (1:55:23.300)

So I think that, you know, if I look at the future, right, and for a while, like, okay,

Lex Fridman (1:55:28.700)

if aliens are out there, they must be broadcasting in radio, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:55:33.340)

That radio, you know, the amount that we broadcast in radio has diminished tremendously in the

Lex Fridman (1:55:41.260)

last 50 years.

Lex Fridman (1:55:43.100)

But we're doing a lot more computation, right?

Lex Fridman (1:55:46.820)

What are the signs of computation?

Lex Fridman (1:55:49.380)

Like that's a good, that's an interesting question to ask, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:55:53.540)

Where I don't know, I think something on the order of a few percent of the entire electrical

Lex Fridman (1:55:58.820)

grid last year went to mining Bitcoin, right?

Lex Fridman (1:56:03.620)

You know,

Konstantin Batygin (1:56:04.620)

Yeah, there could be a lot of in the future, different consequences of the computation,

Konstantin Batygin (1:56:09.820)

which I mean, I'm biased, but it could be robotics, it could be artificial intelligence.

Lex Fridman (1:56:14.780)

So we may be looking for intelligent looking objects, like that's what I meant by probes,

Lex Fridman (1:56:22.580)

like things that move in kind of artificial ways.

Lex Fridman (1:56:25.460)

But the emergence of AI is not an if, right?

Lex Fridman (1:56:29.940)

It's happening right in front of our eyes.

Lex Fridman (1:56:33.800)

And the energetic costs associated with that are becoming, you know, a tangible problem.

Lex Fridman (1:56:39.860)

So I think, you know, if you imagine kind of extrapolating that into the future, right?

Lex Fridman (1:56:45.780)

What are the, you know, what becomes the bottleneck, right?

Konstantin Batygin (1:56:50.680)

The bottleneck might be powering, you know, powering the AI, broadly speaking, not one

Lex Fridman (1:56:57.340)

AI, but powering that entire AI ecosystem, right?

Lex Fridman (1:57:01.180)

So I don't know, I think, you know, space junk is an is kind of, it's an interesting

Konstantin Batygin (1:57:08.380)

idea, but it's heavily influenced by like sci fi of 1950s, where by 2020, we're all

Lex Fridman (1:57:14.100)

like, flying to the moon.

Lex Fridman (1:57:17.440)

And so we produce a lot of space junk, I'm not sure if that's the pathway that alien

Lex Fridman (1:57:23.900)

civilizations take, I've also never seen an alien civilization.

Konstantin Batygin (1:57:28.780)

That's true.

Lex Fridman (1:57:29.780)

But if your theory of chill turns out to be true, and then we don't, you know, we don't

Konstantin Batygin (1:57:36.140)

necessarily explore, we seize the exploration phase of a, like alien civilizations quickly

Konstantin Batygin (1:57:41.740)

seize the exploration phase of their, of their efforts, then, then perhaps they'll just be

Konstantin Batygin (1:57:49.700)

chilling in a particular space, expanding slowly, but then using up a lot of resources

Lex Fridman (1:57:56.020)

and then have to have a lot of garbage disposal that sends stuff out.

Lex Fridman (1:58:00.660)

And the other, you know, the other idea was that it could be a relay that you'll almost

Konstantin Batygin (1:58:06.780)

have like these GPS like markers, these sent throughout, which I think is kind of interesting.

Konstantin Batygin (1:58:12.220)

It's similar to this probe idea of sending a large number of probes out to measure gravitational

Konstantin Batygin (1:58:23.700)

to measure basically, yeah, the gravitational field, essentially, I mean, a lot of people

Konstantin Batygin (1:58:29.060)

at Caltech or at MIT are trying to measure gravitational fields.

Lex Fridman (1:58:33.180)

And there's, there's a lot of ideas of sending stuff out there that accurately measures those

Konstantin Batygin (1:58:41.100)

gravitational fields to have a greater understanding of the early universe.

Lex Fridman (1:58:47.060)

But then you might realize that communication through gravitation, through gravity is actually

Konstantin Batygin (1:58:52.300)

much more effective than, than radio waves, for example, something like that.

Lex Fridman (1:58:56.260)

And then you send out, I mean, okay, if you're an alien civilization that's able to have

Konstantin Batygin (1:59:03.020)

gigantic masses, like basically, we're getting there as a, as a civilization, no, we're not

Lex Fridman (1:59:09.660)

not even close.

Konstantin Batygin (1:59:10.660)

Well, I mean, I mean, like be able to sort of play with black holes, that kind of thing.

Lex Fridman (1:59:18.460)

So we're talking about a whole nother order of magnitude of masses, then it may be very

Konstantin Batygin (1:59:23.980)

effective to send signals via gravitational waves.

Konstantin Batygin (1:59:27.020)

I actually my sense is that all of these things are genuinely difficult to predict, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:59:33.940)

and I don't mean like, to kind of shy away, I just I really mean, if you think if you

Lex Fridman (1:59:38.340)

take imagination of what the future will look like from, you know, 500 years ago, right?

Lex Fridman (1:59:46.900)

It's just, it is so hard to conceive of the impossible, right?

Lex Fridman (1:59:51.460)

So it's, it's almost like, you know, it's almost limiting to try and imagine things

Konstantin Batygin (1:59:58.780)

that are an order of magnitude, you know, or two orders of magnitude ahead in terms

Lex Fridman (20:01.420)

Not rogue planets, but rogue objects from out there.

Konstantin Batygin (20:04.000)

Oh sure.

Lex Fridman (20:05.000)

Oh sure.

Konstantin Batygin (20:06.000)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (20:07.000)

Join the party?

Konstantin Batygin (20:08.000)

Yeah, absolutely.

Konstantin Batygin (20:09.000)

We've seen a couple of them in the last three or so years, maybe four years now.

Konstantin Batygin (20:15.200)

The first one was the one called Uamuamua and it's been all over the news.

Lex Fridman (20:22.060)

The second one was Comet Borisov discovered by a guy named Borisov.

Konstantin Batygin (20:28.600)

Yeah, so the way you know they're coming from elsewhere is unlike solar system objects which

Konstantin Batygin (20:35.960)

travel on elliptical paths around the sun, these guys travel on hyperbolic paths.

Lex Fridman (20:42.060)

So they come in, say hello and then they're gone.

Lex Fridman (20:45.200)

And the fact that they exist is totally like not surprising, right?

Konstantin Batygin (20:52.920)

The Neptune is constantly ejecting Kuiper belt objects into interstellar space.

Lex Fridman (20:59.960)

Our solar system itself is sort of leaking icy debris and ejecting it.

Lex Fridman (21:05.600)

So presumably every planetary systems around other stars do exactly the same thing.

Konstantin Batygin (21:11.920)

Let me ask you about the millions of objects that are part of the Kuiper belt and part

Konstantin Batygin (21:17.120)

of the Oort cloud.

Lex Fridman (21:18.120)

Do you think some of them have primitive life?

Konstantin Batygin (21:20.240)

It kind of makes you sad if there's like primitive life there and they're just kind of like lonely

Lex Fridman (21:25.480)

out there in space.

Konstantin Batygin (21:26.480)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (21:27.480)

Like how many of them do you think have life, like bacterial life?

Konstantin Batygin (21:30.160)

Probably a negligible amount.

Lex Fridman (21:32.000)

Zero with like a plus on top.

Konstantin Batygin (21:35.160)

Right.

Lex Fridman (21:36.160)

Zero plus plus.

Konstantin Batygin (21:37.160)

Yeah.

Konstantin Batygin (21:38.160)

So, you know, if you and I took a little trip to the interstellar medium, I think we would

Lex Fridman (21:46.000)

develop cancer and die real fast, right?

Lex Fridman (21:49.560)

That's rough.

Konstantin Batygin (21:50.560)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (21:51.560)

It's a pretty hostile radiation environment.

Konstantin Batygin (21:54.920)

You don't actually have to go to the interstellar medium.

Lex Fridman (21:56.600)

You just have to leave the earth's magnetic field too.

Lex Fridman (22:00.240)

And then you're not doing so well suddenly.

Lex Fridman (22:03.480)

So you know, this idea of, you know, life kind of traveling between places, it's not

Konstantin Batygin (22:12.720)

entirely implausible, but you really have to twist, I think, a lot of parameters.

Lex Fridman (22:18.480)

One of the problems we have is we don't actually know how life originates, right?

Lex Fridman (22:22.800)

So it's kind of a second order question of survival in the interstellar medium and how

Konstantin Batygin (22:29.520)

resilient it is because we think you require water, but, and that's certainly the case

Konstantin Batygin (22:37.880)

for the earth, but you know, we really don't know for sure.

Konstantin Batygin (22:43.080)

That said, I will argue that the question of like, are there aliens out there is a very

Konstantin Batygin (22:49.160)

boring question because the answer is, of course there are.

Lex Fridman (22:53.520)

I mean, like we know that there are planets around almost every star.

Konstantin Batygin (23:02.800)

Of course there are other life forms.

Lex Fridman (23:05.400)

Life is not some specific thing that happened on the earth and that's it, right?

Konstantin Batygin (23:11.280)

That's a statistical impossibility.

Lex Fridman (23:12.760)

Yeah.

Konstantin Batygin (23:13.760)

Yeah, but the difficult question is before even the fact that we don't know how life

Konstantin Batygin (23:19.240)

originates, I don't think we even know what life is like definitionally, like formalizing

Konstantin Batygin (23:25.240)

a kind of picture of, in terms of the mechanism we would use to search for life out there

Lex Fridman (23:32.440)

or even when we're on a planet to say, is this life?

Konstantin Batygin (23:36.520)

Is this rock that just moved from where it was yesterday life or maybe not even a rock,

Lex Fridman (23:42.480)

something else?

Lex Fridman (23:43.480)

I got to tell you, I want to know what life is, okay?

Lex Fridman (23:46.920)

And I want you to show me.

Konstantin Batygin (23:51.800)

I think there's a song to basically accompany every single thing we talk about today and

Konstantin Batygin (23:57.280)

probably half of them are love songs and somehow we'll integrate George Michael into the whole

Konstantin Batygin (24:02.360)

thing.

Lex Fridman (24:03.360)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (24:04.360)

So your intuition is there's life everywhere in our universe.

Lex Fridman (24:08.100)

Do you think there's intelligent life out there?

Konstantin Batygin (24:10.520)

I think it's entirely plausible.

Lex Fridman (24:11.960)

I mean, it's entirely plausible.

Konstantin Batygin (24:17.280)

I think there's intelligent life on earth and so yeah, taking that, like say whatever

Konstantin Batygin (24:23.640)

this thing we got on earth, whether it's dolphins or humans, say that's intelligent.

Konstantin Batygin (24:29.920)

Definitely dolphins.

Lex Fridman (24:30.920)

I mean, have you seen the dolphins?

Konstantin Batygin (24:34.160)

Well, they do some cruel stuff to each other.

Lex Fridman (24:37.020)

So if cruelty is a definition of intelligence, they're pretty good and then humans are pretty

Konstantin Batygin (24:43.440)

good in that regard.

Lex Fridman (24:44.440)

And then there's like pigs are very intelligent.

Konstantin Batygin (24:48.920)

I got actually a chance to hang out with pigs recently and they're, aside from the fact

Konstantin Batygin (24:54.120)

they were trying to eat me, they love food, they love food, but there's an intelligence

Konstantin Batygin (25:01.840)

to their eyes that was kind of like haunts me because I also love to eat meat and then

Konstantin Batygin (25:09.200)

to meet the thing I later ate and that was very intelligent and almost charismatic with

Konstantin Batygin (25:15.920)

the way he was expressing himself, herself, itself was quite incredible.

Lex Fridman (25:21.480)

So all that to say is if we have intelligent life here on earth, if you take dolphins,

Lex Fridman (25:28.080)

pigs, humans, from the perspective of like planetary science, how unique is earth?

Lex Fridman (25:33.400)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (25:34.400)

So earth is not a common outcome of the planet formation process.

Lex Fridman (25:41.600)

It's probably a something on the order of maybe a 1% effect.

Lex Fridman (25:48.400)

And by earth, I mean not just an earth mass planet, okay?

Konstantin Batygin (25:53.200)

I mean the architecture of the solar system that allows the earth to exist in its kind

Konstantin Batygin (26:00.440)

of very temperate way.

Konstantin Batygin (26:06.300)

One thing to understand and this is pretty crucial, right, is that the earth itself formed

Konstantin Batygin (26:13.440)

well after the gas disk that formed the giant planets had already dissipated.

Konstantin Batygin (26:23.160)

You see stars start out with, you know, the star and then a disk of gas and dust that

Lex Fridman (26:28.720)

encircles it, okay?

Lex Fridman (26:30.800)

From this disk of gas and dust, big planets can emerge.

Lex Fridman (26:36.300)

And we have over the last two, three decades discovered thousands of extra solar planets

Lex Fridman (26:43.640)

as an orbit or other stars.

Lex Fridman (26:45.140)

What we see is that many of them have these expansive hydrogen helium atmospheres.

Konstantin Batygin (26:53.000)

The fact that the earth doesn't is deeply connected to the fact that earth took about

Konstantin Batygin (26:59.840)

100 million years to form.

Lex Fridman (27:01.600)

So we missed that, you know, train, so to speak, to get that hydrogen helium atmosphere.

Lex Fridman (27:08.040)

That's why actually we can see the sky, right?

Konstantin Batygin (27:10.560)

That's why the sky is, well, at least in most places, that's why the atmosphere is not completely

Konstantin Batygin (27:17.440)

opaque.

Konstantin Batygin (27:20.680)

With that, you know, kind of thinking in mind, I would argue that we're getting the kind

Lex Fridman (27:26.880)

of emergent pictures that the earth is not, you know, everywhere, right?

Konstantin Batygin (27:33.360)

There's sort of the sci fi view of things where we go to some other star and we just

Konstantin Batygin (27:37.360)

land on random planets and they're all earth like.

Lex Fridman (27:40.400)

That's totally not true.

Lex Fridman (27:42.000)

But even a low probability event, even if you imagine that earth is a one in a million

Lex Fridman (27:49.120)

or one in 10 million occurrence, there are 10 to the 12 stars in the galaxy, right?

Lex Fridman (27:58.520)

So you just, you always win by, that's right, by supply.

Lex Fridman (28:03.440)

They save you.

Konstantin Batygin (28:04.440)

Well, you've hypothesized that our solar system once possessed a population of short period

Konstantin Batygin (28:10.080)

planets that were destroyed by the evil Jupiter migrating through the solar nebula.

Lex Fridman (28:17.640)

Can you explain?

Konstantin Batygin (28:18.640)

Well, if I was to say what was the kind of the key outcome of searches for extra solar

Konstantin Batygin (28:22.840)

planets, it is that most stars are encircled by short period planets that are, you know,

Lex Fridman (28:30.440)

a few earth masses, right?

Lex Fridman (28:33.180)

So a few times bigger than the earth and have orbital periods that kind of range from days

Lex Fridman (28:39.080)

to weeks.

Konstantin Batygin (28:42.200)

Now if you go and ask the solar system what's in our region, right, in that region, it's

Lex Fridman (28:48.680)

completely empty, right?

Konstantin Batygin (28:50.720)

It's just, it's astonishingly hollow.

Lex Fridman (28:53.960)

And think, you know, from the sun is not some, you know, special star that decided that it

Konstantin Batygin (29:00.560)

was going to form the solar system.

Lex Fridman (29:03.160)

So I think, you know, the natural thing to assume is that the same processes of planet

Konstantin Batygin (29:09.160)

formation that occurred everywhere else also occurred in the solar system.

Konstantin Batygin (29:15.080)

Following this logic, it's not implausible to imagine that the solar system once possessed

Konstantin Batygin (29:20.080)

a system of intra Mercurian, like, you know, compact system of planets.

Lex Fridman (29:28.520)

So then we asked ourselves, would such a system survive to this day?

Lex Fridman (29:33.640)

And the answer is no, at least our calculations suggested it's highly unlikely because of

Lex Fridman (29:40.120)

the formation of Jupiter.

Lex Fridman (29:41.760)

And Jupiter's primordial kind of wandering through the solar system would have sent this

Konstantin Batygin (29:46.080)

collisional field of debris that would have pushed that system of planets onto the sun.

Lex Fridman (29:51.680)

So was Jupiter, this primordial wandering, what did Jupiter look like?

Lex Fridman (29:56.440)

Like, why was it wandering?

Lex Fridman (29:58.120)

It didn't have the orbit it has today?

Konstantin Batygin (2:00:03.460)

of progress, just because, you know, you mentioned cars before, you know, if you were to ask

Lex Fridman (2:00:10.140)

people what they wanted in 1870, it's faster buggies, right?

Lex Fridman (2:00:15.380)

So so I think the whole like, kind of, you know, alien conversation inevitably gets gets

Konstantin Batygin (2:00:23.700)

limited by by our entire kind of collective astrophysical lack of imagination.

Lex Fridman (2:00:31.820)

So to push back a little bit, I find that it's really interesting to talk about these

Konstantin Batygin (2:00:38.200)

wild ideas about the future, whether it's aliens, whether it's AI, with brilliant people

Konstantin Batygin (2:00:43.620)

like yourself, who are focused on very particular tools of science, we have today, to solve

Konstantin Batygin (2:00:49.100)

very particular, like rigorous scientific questions.

Lex Fridman (2:00:52.380)

And it's almost like putting on this wild dreamy hat, like some percent of the time

Lex Fridman (2:00:56.860)

and say, like, what are like, what would alien civilizations look like?

Lex Fridman (2:01:00.460)

What would alien trash look like?

Konstantin Batygin (2:01:03.260)

Well, what would our own civilization that sends out trillions of AI systems out there,

Lex Fridman (2:01:09.620)

like how 9000, but 10,000 out there, what would that look like?

Lex Fridman (2:01:13.580)

And you're right, any one prediction is probably going to be horrendously wrong.

Lex Fridman (2:01:18.220)

But there's something about creating these kind of wild predictions that kind of opens

Konstantin Batygin (2:01:22.940)

up.

Lex Fridman (2:01:23.940)

No, there's a huge magnetism to it, right?

Lex Fridman (2:01:26.620)

And some of some of it, you know, I mean, some of the Jules Verne novels did a phenomenal

Lex Fridman (2:01:35.120)

job predicting the future, right?

Konstantin Batygin (2:01:38.700)

That actually was a great example of what you're talking about, like allowing your imagination

Lex Fridman (2:01:42.360)

to run free.

Konstantin Batygin (2:01:44.500)

I mean, I just hope, I just hope there's dragons.

Lex Fridman (2:01:49.200)

That's like, I love dragons are the best.

Lex Fridman (2:01:54.960)

But see, the cool thing about science fiction and these kinds of conversations, it doesn't

Lex Fridman (2:01:59.380)

just predict the future, I think.

Konstantin Batygin (2:02:01.800)

Some of these things will create the future.

Lex Fridman (2:02:05.940)

Taking the idea, the humans are amazing, like fake it till you make it.

Konstantin Batygin (2:02:12.700)

Humans are really good at taking an idea that seems impossible at the time.

Lex Fridman (2:02:18.420)

And for any one individual human, that idea is like, it's like planting a seed that eventually

Konstantin Batygin (2:02:25.300)

materializes itself.

Lex Fridman (2:02:26.300)

It's weird.

Konstantin Batygin (2:02:27.300)

It's weird how science fiction can create science fiction, it drives the science.

Konstantin Batygin (2:02:32.500)

I agree with you, and I think in this regard, you know, I'm like a sucker for sci fi.

Lex Fridman (2:02:43.460)

It's all I listen to like now when I run and some of it is completely implausible, right?

Lex Fridman (2:02:50.340)

And it's just like, I don't care.

Konstantin Batygin (2:02:54.620)

It's both entertaining and, you know, it's just like, it's imagination.

Lex Fridman (2:03:01.380)

You know about the black clouds book, I think this is by Fred Hoyle.

Konstantin Batygin (2:03:05.580)

This is like, this has great connections with sort of a lot of the advancements that are

Lex Fridman (2:03:09.380)

happening in NLP right now, right, with transformer models and so on.

Lex Fridman (2:03:16.060)

But you know, it's this black cloud shows up in the solar system and then, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:03:21.380)

people try to send radio and then it learns to talk back at you, you know.

Lex Fridman (2:03:26.140)

So anyway, we don't have to talk at all about it, but it's just, it's something worth checking

Lex Fridman (2:03:30.700)

out.

Konstantin Batygin (2:03:31.700)

With that, on the alien front, with the black cloud, to me, exactly, on the NLP front, and

Lex Fridman (2:03:36.700)

also just explainability of AI, it's fascinating.

Konstantin Batygin (2:03:39.980)

Just the very question, Stephen Wolfram looked at this with the movie Arrival, it's like,

Lex Fridman (2:03:44.660)

what would be the common language that we would discover?

Konstantin Batygin (2:03:47.940)

The reason that's really interesting to me is we have aliens here on earth now.

Lex Fridman (2:03:51.740)

Japanese.

Konstantin Batygin (2:03:52.740)

Japanese, oh yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:03:53.740)

Japanese is the obvious answer.

Konstantin Batygin (2:03:54.740)

Japanese, yeah, that would be the common, maybe it would be music, actually.

Lex Fridman (2:03:59.900)

That's more likely.

Konstantin Batygin (2:04:00.900)

It wouldn't be a language.

Lex Fridman (2:04:01.900)

It would be art that they would communicate.

Lex Fridman (2:04:04.020)

But you know, I do believe that we have, I'm with Stephen Wolfram on this a little bit,

Konstantin Batygin (2:04:09.900)

that to me, computation, like programs we write, that, you know, that they're kind of

Konstantin Batygin (2:04:16.540)

intelligent creatures and I feel like we haven't found the common language to talk with them.

Konstantin Batygin (2:04:21.300)

Like our little creations that are artificial are not born with whatever that innate thing

Konstantin Batygin (2:04:28.820)

that produces language with us and like, coming up with mechanisms for communicating with

Lex Fridman (2:04:34.900)

them is an effort that feels like it will produce some incredible discoveries.

Konstantin Batygin (2:04:42.540)

You can even think of, if you think that math has discovered, mathematics in itself is a

Lex Fridman (2:04:47.820)

kind of...

Konstantin Batygin (2:04:48.820)

Oh yeah, it's an innate construction of the world we live in.

Konstantin Batygin (2:04:54.060)

I think we are, you know, part of the way there because pre 1950, right, computers were

Lex Fridman (2:05:05.620)

human beings that would carry out arithmetic, right?

Lex Fridman (2:05:09.300)

And I think it was Ulam who worked in Los Alamos at the time, like towards the end of

Konstantin Batygin (2:05:17.340)

the second world war, wrote something about how, you know, in the future, right, computers

Konstantin Batygin (2:05:23.200)

will not be just arithmetic tool, but will be truly an interactive, you know, thing with

Lex Fridman (2:05:31.240)

which you could do experiments, right?

Konstantin Batygin (2:05:34.380)

At the time, the notion of doing an experiment, not like in the lab with some beakers, but

Konstantin Batygin (2:05:40.340)

an experiment on a computer, designing an experiment, a numerical experiment was a new

Lex Fridman (2:05:47.660)

one.

Konstantin Batygin (2:05:48.660)

Like, you know, 70% of what I do is I design, you know, I write code, terrible code to be

Konstantin Batygin (2:05:55.580)

clear, like, but, you know, I write code that creates an experiment, which is a simulation.

Lex Fridman (2:06:04.340)

So in that sense, I think we're beginning to interact with the computer in a way that

Konstantin Batygin (2:06:08.860)

you're saying, not as just a, you know, fancy calculator, not as just a, you know, call

Lex Fridman (2:06:14.820)

and request type of thing, but, you know, something that can generate insights that

Konstantin Batygin (2:06:23.740)

are otherwise completely unattainable, right there, unattainable by doing analytical mathematics.

Konstantin Batygin (2:06:29.340)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:06:30.340)

And there's, with AlphaFold 2, we're now starting to crack open biology, so being able to simulate

Konstantin Batygin (2:06:38.100)

at first trivial biological systems and hopefully down the line, complex biological systems.

Konstantin Batygin (2:06:43.240)

My hope is to be able to simulate psychological, like sociological systems, like humans.

Konstantin Batygin (2:06:49.380)

I've, you know, a large part of my work at MIT was on autonomous vehicles, and the fascinating

Konstantin Batygin (2:06:57.180)

thing to me was about pedestrians, human pedestrians interacting with autonomous vehicles and simulating

Konstantin Batygin (2:07:03.220)

those systems without murdering humans would be very useful, but nevertheless is exceptionally

Lex Fridman (2:07:07.980)

difficult.

Konstantin Batygin (2:07:08.980)

Yeah, I would say so.

Lex Fridman (2:07:09.980)

When is my Mustang gonna drive itself?

Konstantin Batygin (2:07:11.980)

Right.

Lex Fridman (2:07:12.980)

I'm not even joking, it's like, yeah.

Konstantin Batygin (2:07:16.700)

It turns out it's much more difficult than we imagined, and I suppose that's the kind

Konstantin Batygin (2:07:23.300)

of, the progress of science is just like, you know, going to Mars, it's probably going

Konstantin Batygin (2:07:32.720)

to turn out to be way more difficult than we imagined.

Konstantin Batygin (2:07:35.500)

Sending out probes to investigate Planet 9 at the edge of our solar system might turn

Konstantin Batygin (2:07:39.820)

out to be way more difficult than we imagined, but we do it anyway, and we figure it out

Lex Fridman (2:07:43.700)

in the end.

Konstantin Batygin (2:07:44.700)

It's actually, Mars is a great, I mean, going, sending humans to Mars is way more complicated

Lex Fridman (2:07:49.660)

than sending humans to the moon.

Konstantin Batygin (2:07:51.580)

You'd think, just like naively, both are in space, who cares, like, if you go there, why

Konstantin Batygin (2:07:57.380)

don't you go there, you know, just life support is an extremely expensive thing, yeah.

Konstantin Batygin (2:08:05.500)

There's a bunch of extra challenges, but I disagree with you, I would be one of the early

Lex Fridman (2:08:09.100)

people to go.

Konstantin Batygin (2:08:10.100)

I used to think not, I used to think I'd be one of the first maybe million to go once

Konstantin Batygin (2:08:14.180)

you have a little bit of a society, I think I'm upgrading myself to the first like 10,000.

Konstantin Batygin (2:08:18.820)

Yeah, that's right, front of the cabin.

Konstantin Batygin (2:08:22.000)

Not completely front, but like, it would be interesting to die, I'm okay with, death sucks,

Lex Fridman (2:08:30.020)

but I kind of like the idea of dying on Mars.

Konstantin Batygin (2:08:34.160)

Of all the places to die, I gotta say, in this regard, like, I don't wanna die on Mars.

Lex Fridman (2:08:39.580)

You don't?

Lex Fridman (2:08:40.580)

No, no, I would much rather die on Earth.

Konstantin Batygin (2:08:45.220)

I mean, death is fundamentally boring, right, like, death is a very boring experience, but

Lex Fridman (2:08:50.940)

I mean, I've never died before, so I don't know from first hand experience.

Konstantin Batygin (2:08:54.180)

As far as you know.

Lex Fridman (2:08:55.180)

Yeah.

Konstantin Batygin (2:08:56.180)

It could be reincarnation, all those kinds of things.

Lex Fridman (2:08:57.780)

So you mean, where would you die?

Lex Fridman (2:09:01.700)

If you had to choose?

Konstantin Batygin (2:09:04.700)

Oh, man, okay, so I would definitely, there's a question of who I'd wanna die with, I prefer

Konstantin Batygin (2:09:13.420)

not to die alone, but like, surrounded by family would be preferable, where I think

Konstantin Batygin (2:09:22.660)

Northern New Mexico, and I'm not even joking, like, this is not a random place, it's just

Konstantin Batygin (2:09:27.500)

like.

Lex Fridman (2:09:28.500)

Would that be your favorite place on Earth?

Konstantin Batygin (2:09:31.620)

Not necessarily, like, favorite place on Earth to reside, you know, indefinitely, but it

Lex Fridman (2:09:38.700)

is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been to.

Lex Fridman (2:09:43.460)

So you know, there's something, I don't know, there's something attractive about going,

Lex Fridman (2:09:49.540)

you know.

Konstantin Batygin (2:09:50.540)

Returning to nature in a beautiful place.

Lex Fridman (2:09:54.760)

Let me ask you about another aspect of your life that is full of beauty, music.

Konstantin Batygin (2:09:59.660)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (2:10:00.660)

You're a musician.

Konstantin Batygin (2:10:02.900)

The absurd question I have to ask, what is the greatest song of all time, objectively

Lex Fridman (2:10:08.660)

speaking?

Konstantin Batygin (2:10:09.660)

The greatest song of all time.

Konstantin Batygin (2:10:10.820)

I suppose that could change moment to moment, day to day, but if you were forced to answer

Konstantin Batygin (2:10:16.000)

for this particular moment in your life, that's something that pops to mind, this could be

Konstantin Batygin (2:10:20.820)

both philosophically, this could be technically as a musician, like what you enjoy, maybe

Konstantin Batygin (2:10:25.060)

lyrics.

Konstantin Batygin (2:10:26.060)

Lyrics is very important, so I would probably, it would be, my choice would be lyrics based.

Konstantin Batygin (2:10:32.580)

I don't want to answer in terms of just technical, you know, technical prowess.

Lex Fridman (2:10:37.380)

I think technical prowess is impressive, right?

Konstantin Batygin (2:10:41.540)

It's just like, it's impressive what can be done.

Lex Fridman (2:10:44.940)

I wouldn't place that into the category of the greatest music ever written.

Konstantin Batygin (2:10:49.420)

Some classical music that's written is undeniably beautiful, but I don't want to consider that

Konstantin Batygin (2:10:57.420)

category of music either, just because, you know, so if I have to limit the scope of this

Konstantin Batygin (2:11:06.700)

philosophical discussion to, you know, the kind of music that I listen to, you know,

Konstantin Batygin (2:11:13.240)

probably What's My Age Again by Blink 182, it's just, you know, it's a solid one.

Konstantin Batygin (2:11:18.660)

It's got, you know.

Lex Fridman (2:11:21.740)

Said nobody ever.

Konstantin Batygin (2:11:22.740)

That's a good song.

Lex Fridman (2:11:23.740)

I don't know if you're joking.

Konstantin Batygin (2:11:24.740)

No, no.

Lex Fridman (2:11:25.740)

I am joking.

Konstantin Batygin (2:11:26.740)

It's a good one, but it's, yeah, I mean.

Lex Fridman (2:11:29.740)

I was going to come back as a close second.

Konstantin Batygin (2:11:32.860)

What's My Age Again, oh, yeah.

Konstantin Batygin (2:11:37.180)

No, I mean, it would probably, you know, songwriting wise, I think The Beatles came pretty close

Konstantin Batygin (2:11:44.780)

to.

Lex Fridman (2:11:45.780)

Were they influential to you?

Konstantin Batygin (2:11:46.780)

Absolutely.

Lex Fridman (2:11:47.780)

Yeah.

Konstantin Batygin (2:11:48.780)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:11:49.780)

Love The Beatles.

Konstantin Batygin (2:11:50.780)

I love The Beatles.

Lex Fridman (2:11:51.780)

Let it be yesterday.

Konstantin Batygin (2:11:52.780)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:11:53.780)

Like, I think Strawberry Fields Forever is one.

Lex Fridman (2:11:57.300)

You know what one of my favorite Beatles songs is?

Lex Fridman (2:12:00.260)

It's, you know, In My Life, right?

Konstantin Batygin (2:12:04.220)

It's hard to imagine how, whatever, a 24 year old wrote that.

Lex Fridman (2:12:09.300)

It is one of the most introspective pieces of music ever.

Konstantin Batygin (2:12:14.340)

You know, I'm a huge Pink Floyd fan, and so I think, you know, if you were to, you can

Konstantin Batygin (2:12:20.740)

sort of look at the entire Dark Side of the Moon album as, you know, getting pretty close

Konstantin Batygin (2:12:27.380)

up there to the pinnacle of what, you know, can be created, so, you know, Time is a great

Lex Fridman (2:12:32.660)

song.

Konstantin Batygin (2:12:33.660)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:12:34.660)

It's a great song.

Konstantin Batygin (2:12:35.660)

Just the entirety of just the instruments, the lyrics, the feeling created by a song,

Lex Fridman (2:12:42.380)

like Pink Floyd can create feelings.

Konstantin Batygin (2:12:46.860)

The entire experience, I mean, you have that with The Wall of just transporting you into

Lex Fridman (2:12:52.420)

another place.

Konstantin Batygin (2:12:54.060)

Songs don't, not many songs could do that as well.

Lex Fridman (2:12:58.220)

Not many artists can do that as well as Pink Floyd did.

Konstantin Batygin (2:13:00.660)

There are a lot of bands that you can kind of say, oh yeah, like if you take Blink 182,

Lex Fridman (2:13:06.580)

right?

Konstantin Batygin (2:13:07.580)

You have no idea, like if you are listening to sort of that type of pop punk for the first

Konstantin Batygin (2:13:13.740)

time, it's difficult to differentiate between Blink 182 and like Sum 41 and the thousand

Konstantin Batygin (2:13:20.100)

of other like lesser known bands that all sounded, they all had that sparkling production

Lex Fridman (2:13:25.780)

feel, they all kind of sounded the same, right?

Konstantin Batygin (2:13:32.020)

With Pink Floyd, it's hard to find another band that you're like, well, is this one Pink

Lex Fridman (2:13:38.180)

Floyd?

Konstantin Batygin (2:13:39.180)

Like you know when you're listening to Pink Floyd what you're listening to.

Lex Fridman (2:13:43.420)

The uniqueness, that's fascinating.

Konstantin Batygin (2:13:45.520)

You know, in the calculation of the greatest song in the greatest band of all time, you

Konstantin Batygin (2:13:51.540)

could probably, you could probably actually quantify this like scientifically, is like

Lex Fridman (2:13:56.580)

how unique, if you play different songs, how well are people able to recognize whether

Lex Fridman (2:14:01.900)

it's this band or not?

Lex Fridman (2:14:03.660)

And that, you know, that's probably a huge component to greatness.

Lex Fridman (2:14:07.300)

Like if the world would miss it if it was gone.

Konstantin Batygin (2:14:10.620)

Yes.

Lex Fridman (2:14:11.620)

Yes.

Konstantin Batygin (2:14:12.620)

So.

Lex Fridman (2:14:13.620)

But there's also the human story things, like I would say I would put Johnny Cash's cover

Konstantin Batygin (2:14:17.420)

of Hurt as one of the greatest songs of all time.

Lex Fridman (2:14:22.140)

And that has less to do with the song.

Lex Fridman (2:14:24.740)

But your interaction with it.

Lex Fridman (2:14:26.780)

Interaction with it, but also the human, the full story of the human.

Konstantin Batygin (2:14:29.840)

You're like, it's not just, if I just heard the song, I'd be like, okay.

Lex Fridman (2:14:34.500)

But if it's the full story of it, also the video component for that particular song.

Lex Fridman (2:14:40.360)

So like that, you can't discount the full experience of it.

Lex Fridman (2:14:43.980)

Absolutely.

Konstantin Batygin (2:14:44.980)

You know, I have no confusion about not, about being, you know, anywhere, you know, in that

Konstantin Batygin (2:14:52.900)

league, but I just like sometimes think about, you know, music that is being produced today

Konstantin Batygin (2:15:01.180)

feels oftentimes, it feels like kind of clothes, like clothes that you buy at like H&M and

Lex Fridman (2:15:08.900)

you wear it three times before they rip and you throw away.

Lex Fridman (2:15:12.980)

So like so much of it is, it's not bad, it's just kind of forgettable, right?

Konstantin Batygin (2:15:18.760)

Like the fact that we're talking about Pink Floyd in 2021 is in itself an interesting

Konstantin Batygin (2:15:24.980)

question.

Lex Fridman (2:15:26.500)

Why are we talking about Pink Floyd?

Lex Fridman (2:15:28.300)

And there's something unforgettable about them and unforgettable about the art that

Lex Fridman (2:15:33.180)

they created.

Konstantin Batygin (2:15:34.420)

That could be the markets that like, so Spotify has created this kind of market where the

Konstantin Batygin (2:15:41.220)

incentives for creating music that lasts is much lower because there's so much more music.

Konstantin Batygin (2:15:46.460)

You just want something that shines bright for a short amount of time, makes a lot of

Lex Fridman (2:15:50.820)

money and moves on.

Lex Fridman (2:15:51.820)

And I mean, the same thing you see with the news and all those kinds of things, we're

Konstantin Batygin (2:15:54.980)

just living in a shorter and shorter, shorter like a time scale in terms of our attention

Konstantin Batygin (2:16:00.700)

spans.

Lex Fridman (2:16:01.860)

And that, nevertheless, when we look at the long arc of history of music, perhaps there

Konstantin Batygin (2:16:07.100)

will be some songs from today that will last as much as Pink Floyd, we're just unable to

Lex Fridman (2:16:12.580)

see it.

Konstantin Batygin (2:16:13.580)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:16:14.580)

Just the collected works of Nickelback.

Konstantin Batygin (2:16:15.580)

Exactly.

Lex Fridman (2:16:16.580)

You never know.

Konstantin Batygin (2:16:17.580)

You never know.

Lex Fridman (2:16:18.580)

Justin Bieber.

Konstantin Batygin (2:16:19.580)

It could be a contender.

Konstantin Batygin (2:16:20.580)

I've recently started listening to Justin Bieber just to understand what people are

Konstantin Batygin (2:16:24.140)

talking about.

Lex Fridman (2:16:25.140)

And I'll just keep my comments to myself on that one.

Konstantin Batygin (2:16:28.140)

It's too good to explain in words.

Lex Fridman (2:16:29.940)

The words cannot capture the greatness that is the Biebs.

Konstantin Batygin (2:16:35.780)

You as a musician, so you write your own music, you play guitar, you sing.

Lex Fridman (2:16:44.180)

Maybe can you give an overview of the role music has played in your life?

Konstantin Batygin (2:16:49.100)

You're one of the, you're a world class scientist.

Lex Fridman (2:16:52.680)

And so it's kind of fascinating to see somebody in your position who is also a great musician

Lex Fridman (2:17:01.500)

and still loves playing music.

Lex Fridman (2:17:04.500)

Yeah.

Konstantin Batygin (2:17:05.500)

Well, I wouldn't call myself a great musician.

Lex Fridman (2:17:06.500)

I'm like, you know.

Konstantin Batygin (2:17:07.500)

One of the best of all time.

Lex Fridman (2:17:08.500)

Yeah.

Konstantin Batygin (2:17:09.500)

That's right.

Konstantin Batygin (2:17:10.500)

Like we were saying offline, confidence is like the most essential thing about being

Konstantin Batygin (2:17:15.940)

a rock star.

Lex Fridman (2:17:16.940)

That's right.

Konstantin Batygin (2:17:17.940)

Exactly.

Lex Fridman (2:17:18.940)

It's the confidence and kind of like moodiness, right?

Konstantin Batygin (2:17:20.620)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:17:21.620)

Yeah.

Konstantin Batygin (2:17:22.620)

Look, I mean, music plays an absolutely essential role in everything I do because I lose, if

Konstantin Batygin (2:17:31.180)

I stop playing for one reason or another, say I'm traveling, I notably lose creativity

Lex Fridman (2:17:38.220)

in every other aspect of my life, right?

Konstantin Batygin (2:17:41.140)

There's something, I don't view, you know, playing music as a separate endeavor from

Konstantin Batygin (2:17:48.540)

doing science or doing whatever.

Konstantin Batygin (2:17:50.460)

It's all part of that same creative thing, which is distinct from, I don't know, pressing

Konstantin Batygin (2:18:01.240)

a button or like, you know.

Lex Fridman (2:18:02.660)

So it's not a break from science, it's a part of your science.

Konstantin Batygin (2:18:06.020)

Absolutely, it's a part of, I would say, you know, it's a thing that enables the science,

Lex Fridman (2:18:12.860)

right?

Konstantin Batygin (2:18:13.860)

The science would, you know, suck even more than it does already without the music.

Lex Fridman (2:18:19.380)

And that means like the creating of the writing of the music or is it just even playing other

Lex Fridman (2:18:23.300)

people's stuff?

Lex Fridman (2:18:24.300)

Is it the whole of it?

Konstantin Batygin (2:18:26.340)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:18:27.340)

It's definitely both.

Konstantin Batygin (2:18:28.340)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:18:29.340)

And also just, you know, I love to play guitar, I love to sing, you know.

Konstantin Batygin (2:18:36.940)

My wife tolerates my screeching singing, you know, and even kind of likes it.

Lex Fridman (2:18:44.220)

Yeah, so people should check out your stuff.

Konstantin Batygin (2:18:46.820)

You have a great voice, so I love your stuff.

Konstantin Batygin (2:18:49.960)

Is there something, you're super busy, is there something you can say about practicing

Konstantin Batygin (2:18:57.920)

for musicians, for guitar, you're also in a band, so like that whole, how you can manage

Lex Fridman (2:19:03.680)

that?

Konstantin Batygin (2:19:04.680)

Is there some tricks, is there some hacks to being a lifelong musician while being like

Lex Fridman (2:19:09.980)

super busy?

Lex Fridman (2:19:11.140)

So I would say, you know, the way that I optimize my life is I try to do, you know, the thing

Konstantin Batygin (2:19:19.980)

that I'm passionate about in a moment and put that at the top of the priority list.

Konstantin Batygin (2:19:26.140)

There are moments when, you know, you just, you feel inspired to play music and if you're

Lex Fridman (2:19:30.740)

in the middle of something, if you can avoid, if that can be put on hold, just do it, right?

Konstantin Batygin (2:19:35.340)

There are times when you get inspired about something scientific, you know, I do my best

Konstantin Batygin (2:19:43.020)

to drop everything, go into that, you know, mode of, that isolated mode and execute upon

Konstantin Batygin (2:19:51.260)

that.

Konstantin Batygin (2:19:52.260)

It's a chaotic, you know, I think I have a pretty chaotic lifestyle where I'm always

Konstantin Batygin (2:19:57.000)

doing kind of multiple things and jumping between what I'm doing.

Lex Fridman (2:20:03.580)

But at the end of the day, it's not like, you know, those moments of inspiration are

Lex Fridman (2:20:13.020)

actually kind of rare, right?

Konstantin Batygin (2:20:14.780)

Like most of the time, all of us are just doing kind of, doing the stuff that needs

Konstantin Batygin (2:20:21.740)

to get done.

Konstantin Batygin (2:20:23.040)

If you do the disservice to yourself of saying, oh, I'm inspired to, you know, do this calculation,

Konstantin Batygin (2:20:29.740)

figure this out, but I've got to answer email or just like do something silly, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:20:37.580)

that is nothing more than disservice.

Lex Fridman (2:20:40.940)

And also, like I have some social media presence, but I mostly stay off of, you know, social

Konstantin Batygin (2:20:48.500)

media to, you know, just frankly, cause like, I don't kind of, I don't enjoy the mental

Konstantin Batygin (2:20:55.460)

cycles that it, that it takes over.

Konstantin Batygin (2:20:57.500)

Yeah, it robs you of that, the, yeah, those precious moments that could be filled with

Konstantin Batygin (2:21:03.940)

inspiration in your, in your other pursuits.

Lex Fridman (2:21:08.220)

But there's something to, maybe you and I are different in this, like I tried to play

Konstantin Batygin (2:21:12.160)

at least 10 minutes of guitar every day, like almost on the technical side, like keeping

Lex Fridman (2:21:20.420)

that base of basic competence going.

Lex Fridman (2:21:27.420)

And I mean, the same way like writers will get in front of a paper no matter what, that

Konstantin Batygin (2:21:31.500)

kind of thing, it just feels like that for my life has been essential to the daily ritual

Konstantin Batygin (2:21:38.980)

of it.

Lex Fridman (2:21:39.980)

Why does days turn into weeks, weeks turn into months, and you haven't played guitar

Lex Fridman (2:21:44.220)

for months?

Lex Fridman (2:21:45.220)

No, no, I, I, I understand.

Konstantin Batygin (2:21:47.500)

For me, I think it's, it's been like, if we have a gig coming up, we'll definitely

Lex Fridman (2:21:53.180)

You need deadlines.

Konstantin Batygin (2:21:54.180)

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

Konstantin Batygin (2:21:55.180)

No, like we, we will, we will sharpen up definitely, you know, especially coming up to a gig.

Konstantin Batygin (2:22:03.060)

It's like, you know, we're not trying to make money with this.

Konstantin Batygin (2:22:06.660)

This is like, just for the, for that satisfaction of doing something and doing something well,

Lex Fridman (2:22:13.540)

right?

Lex Fridman (2:22:15.300)

But overall, I would say most, I play guitar most days, most days.

Lex Fridman (2:22:22.900)

And you know, when I put kids to sleep, I play guitar, you know, with them and we like,

Konstantin Batygin (2:22:29.980)

just make up random songs about, you know, about our cat or something, you know, like

Konstantin Batygin (2:22:35.460)

we just do kind of random stuff.

Lex Fridman (2:22:39.060)

But you know, music is always involved in that process.

Konstantin Batygin (2:22:41.780)

Yeah, keeping it fun.

Lex Fridman (2:22:43.340)

You have Russian roots?

Konstantin Batygin (2:22:44.460)

I sure do.

Lex Fridman (2:22:45.460)

Were you born in Russia?

Konstantin Batygin (2:22:46.460)

I was.

Lex Fridman (2:22:47.460)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:22:48.460)

When did you come here?

Lex Fridman (2:22:49.460)

So, I came to the US in very, the very end of 99.

Lex Fridman (2:22:55.300)

But so I was like, almost 14 years old.

Lex Fridman (2:22:59.880)

But along the way, we spent six years in Japan.

Lex Fridman (2:23:03.360)

So like, we moved from Russia to Japan in 94, and then to the US in 99.

Lex Fridman (2:23:10.620)

So did like elementary school, middle school in Japan.

Lex Fridman (2:23:14.220)

So elementary school in Japan.

Lex Fridman (2:23:16.620)

Yeah.

Konstantin Batygin (2:23:17.620)

So, that's interesting, dad.

Lex Fridman (2:23:19.220)

Do you still speak Russian?

Konstantin Batygin (2:23:20.220)

Sure.

Lex Fridman (2:23:21.220)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (2:23:22.220)

Ты по русски говоришь?

Lex Fridman (2:23:23.220)

Да, конечно.

Lex Fridman (2:23:24.220)

Okay, maybe I'll, let me ask you, in Russian, что ты помнишь о России?

Lex Fridman (2:23:31.660)

It'd be interesting to hear you speak Russian.

Konstantin Batygin (2:23:33.660)

В общем, в целом, я помню, то есть мне было восемь, когда

Lex Fridman (2:23:38.100)

мы уехали, и, конечно, как сказать, помню в первом

Konstantin Batygin (2:23:47.140)

приближении всё, включая вот переход, там, 91, 92 год,

Lex Fridman (2:23:52.700)

вот этот вот, вот этот турбулентный период, и ещё, естественно,

Konstantin Batygin (2:23:56.700)

93.

Lex Fridman (2:23:57.700)

То есть ещё я очень хорошо помню, как в какой то момент

Konstantin Batygin (2:24:03.700)

сначала появилась пепси кола, а потом появилась

Lex Fridman (2:24:07.900)

кока кола.

Konstantin Batygin (2:24:08.900)

Я потом, я помню, я был лет, не знаю, в шесть, и я потом,

Lex Fridman (2:24:13.500)

как так может быть, что кока кола украла продукт и

Lex Fridman (2:24:17.420)

сделала то же самое?

Lex Fridman (2:24:18.740)

То есть я никогда, я долго думал, что и пепси, и кока

Konstantin Batygin (2:24:26.060)

колу изобрели, типа, в 92 году.

Lex Fridman (2:24:30.020)

So for people who don't speak Russian, Konstantin was talking

Konstantin Batygin (2:24:33.360)

about basically his first, in 1992, interaction with capitalism,

Lex Fridman (2:24:39.220)

which is Pepsi, and at first he discovered Pepsi, and then he

Konstantin Batygin (2:24:43.020)

discovered Coke, and he was confused how such, how such

Lex Fridman (2:24:47.780)

theft could occur.

Konstantin Batygin (2:24:48.780)

Yeah, like an intellectual property theft.

Lex Fridman (2:24:50.340)

And remember, Pepsi arrived to the Soviet Union first,

Lex Fridman (2:24:55.180)

and there was some, there's some complicated story which I

Lex Fridman (2:24:58.300)

don't quite understand the details of.

Konstantin Batygin (2:25:00.980)

For a while, Pepsi like commanded submarines or

Lex Fridman (2:25:05.620)

something.

Konstantin Batygin (2:25:06.620)

Yeah, Pepsi had like a fleet of Soviet submarines that it

Lex Fridman (2:25:09.700)

was.

Konstantin Batygin (2:25:10.700)

They were sponsoring tanks and this fascinating.

Lex Fridman (2:25:13.860)

And I remember, there's certain things that trickled in, like

Konstantin Batygin (2:25:16.700)

McDonald's, I remember that was a big deal.

Lex Fridman (2:25:18.500)

Oh yeah.

Konstantin Batygin (2:25:19.500)

Certain aspects of the West.

Lex Fridman (2:25:20.500)

Absolutely.

Konstantin Batygin (2:25:21.500)

So, I mean, we went to McDonald's, and we stood on, I mean,

Lex Fridman (2:25:25.300)

this is, this is absurd, right, from, kind of looking at it

Konstantin Batygin (2:25:29.140)

from today's perspective, but we stood in line for like six

Lex Fridman (2:25:33.700)

hours to get into this McDonald's, and I remember inside

Konstantin Batygin (2:25:38.140)

it was just like a billion people, and I'm just taking a

Lex Fridman (2:25:42.420)

bite out of that Big Mac, and we're like, wow.

Lex Fridman (2:25:47.080)

What was it, an incredible experience for you?

Lex Fridman (2:25:49.540)

So, like, what is this taste of the West like?

Lex Fridman (2:25:52.580)

Did you enjoy it?

Lex Fridman (2:25:53.580)

I enjoyed the fact that, I mean, this is like, this is getting

Konstantin Batygin (2:25:58.060)

into the weeds, but I really enjoyed the fact that the top of

Lex Fridman (2:26:01.740)

the bun had those seeds, you know, like, and I remember how

Konstantin Batygin (2:26:06.060)

on the commercials, like, the Big Mac would kind of bounce.

Lex Fridman (2:26:08.780)

I was like, the seeds, how do they inject the seeds into the

Lex Fridman (2:26:12.140)

bread?

Lex Fridman (2:26:13.140)

Like, amazing.

Konstantin Batygin (2:26:14.140)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:26:15.140)

Right.

Konstantin Batygin (2:26:16.140)

So, I think it was...

Lex Fridman (2:26:17.140)

Artistry.

Konstantin Batygin (2:26:18.140)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:26:19.140)

But you enjoyed the artistry of the culinary experience.

Konstantin Batygin (2:26:21.460)

Exactly.

Lex Fridman (2:26:22.460)

It was the, you know, it was the food art that is the Big Mac.

Konstantin Batygin (2:26:25.940)

Actually, I still don't know the answer to that.

Lex Fridman (2:26:27.620)

How do they get the sesame seeds on the bun?

Konstantin Batygin (2:26:28.980)

It's better to not know the answer.

Lex Fridman (2:26:31.580)

You just wander the mystery of it all.

Konstantin Batygin (2:26:33.420)

Yeah, I remember it being exceptionally delicious, but I'm with you, I don't know, you didn't

Konstantin Batygin (2:26:39.340)

mention how transformative Pepsi was, but to me, basically sugar based stuff, like Pepsi

Konstantin Batygin (2:26:45.180)

was, or Coke, I don't remember which one we partook in, but that was an incredible experience.

Lex Fridman (2:26:51.060)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.

Konstantin Batygin (2:26:53.380)

And, you know, I think it's, you know, it was an important and formative period.

Konstantin Batygin (2:27:04.020)

I sometimes, I guess, rely on that a little bit, you know, in my daily life, because I

Konstantin Batygin (2:27:10.540)

remember, like, the early 90s were real rough, you know, like my parents were kind of on

Konstantin Batygin (2:27:18.900)

the bottom of the spectrum in terms of, you know, in terms of financial well being.

Lex Fridman (2:27:26.540)

So kind of like just when I run into trouble, not like, you know, money trouble, just any

Konstantin Batygin (2:27:35.480)

kind of trouble these days, it just kind of is not particularly meaningful when you compare

Konstantin Batygin (2:27:42.220)

it to that turbulent time of the early 90s.

Lex Fridman (2:27:45.260)

And the other thing is, I think there's like an advantage to being, you know, an immigrant,

Konstantin Batygin (2:27:52.460)

which is that you go through the mental exercise of changing your environment completely early

Lex Fridman (2:27:59.900)

in your life, right?

Konstantin Batygin (2:28:00.900)

You go, it's by no means, you know, pleasant in the moment, right, but like going into

Konstantin Batygin (2:28:07.500)

Japanese elementary school, right, like, I didn't go to some, like, private, you know,

Konstantin Batygin (2:28:13.860)

thing, I just went to a regular, like, Japanese public elementary school, and I was the non

Lex Fridman (2:28:19.860)

Japanese person in my class.

Lex Fridman (2:28:22.900)

So just like to learn Japanese and just kind of.

Lex Fridman (2:28:26.420)

So that's a super humbling experience in many ways was when you like made fun of all that

Konstantin Batygin (2:28:30.860)

kind of stuff.

Lex Fridman (2:28:31.860)

Oh, yeah.

Konstantin Batygin (2:28:32.860)

Being the outsider.

Lex Fridman (2:28:33.860)

Oh, absolutely.

Konstantin Batygin (2:28:34.860)

But, you know, you kind of do, you kind of do that, and then you kind of, then you just

Lex Fridman (2:28:41.420)

kind of are okay with stuff, you know what I mean?

Lex Fridman (2:28:44.580)

And so like doing that, again, in middle school in the US, it was arguably easy, because I

Lex Fridman (2:28:50.980)

was like, yeah, well, I've already done this before.

Lex Fridman (2:28:53.220)

So I think it kind of prepares you mentally a little bit for switching up for whatever,

Lex Fridman (2:28:59.340)

you know, changes that will come up for the rest of your life.

Lex Fridman (2:29:02.380)

So I wouldn't trade that, that experience really for anything.

Lex Fridman (2:29:08.100)

It's a huge aspect of who I am, and I'm sure you can relate to a lot of this.

Konstantin Batygin (2:29:14.860)

Yes.

Konstantin Batygin (2:29:15.860)

Is there advice from your life that you can give to young people today, high school, college,

Lex Fridman (2:29:22.420)

you know, about their career, or maybe about life in general?

Lex Fridman (2:29:26.760)

I'm not like a career coach, but I'm definitely not a life coach.

Konstantin Batygin (2:29:32.020)

I don't have it all figured out.

Lex Fridman (2:29:33.900)

But I think there's a perpetual cycle of, you know, thinking that there is a, there's

Lex Fridman (2:29:45.420)

kind of like a template for success, right?

Lex Fridman (2:29:48.900)

Maybe there is, but in my experience, I haven't seen it, right?

Lex Fridman (2:29:56.380)

You know, I would say people in high school, right?

Lex Fridman (2:30:01.540)

So much of their focus is on getting straight A's, filling their CV with this and this and

Lex Fridman (2:30:07.260)

this so that it looks impressive, right?

Lex Fridman (2:30:13.020)

That is not, I think, a good way to optimize your life, right?

Konstantin Batygin (2:30:17.420)

Do the thing that fills your life with passion.

Lex Fridman (2:30:20.580)

Do the thing that fills your life with interest.

Lex Fridman (2:30:24.940)

And you know, do that perpetually, right?

Konstantin Batygin (2:30:28.300)

A straight A student, you know, is really impressive, but also, you know, somewhat boring,

Lex Fridman (2:30:36.140)

right?

Konstantin Batygin (2:30:37.140)

So, I think, you know, injection of more of that kind of interest into the lives of young

Konstantin Batygin (2:30:44.380)

people would go a long way in just both upping their level of happiness and then just kind

Konstantin Batygin (2:30:51.540)

of ensuring that, looking forward, they are not suffering from a, you know, perpetual

Lex Fridman (2:30:58.740)

condition of, oh, I have to satisfy these, like, you know, check boxes to do well, right?

Konstantin Batygin (2:31:04.500)

Because you can lose yourself in that whole process for the rest of your life, but it's

Konstantin Batygin (2:31:08.100)

nice if it's possible, like Max Tegmark was exceptionally good at this at MIT, figure

Konstantin Batygin (2:31:13.520)

out how you can spend a small part of your, percent of your efforts that, such that your

Konstantin Batygin (2:31:20.020)

CV looks really impressive.

Lex Fridman (2:31:21.940)

Yeah, absolutely.

Konstantin Batygin (2:31:23.980)

There's no, like, without a doubt, like, that's a baseline that you need to have.

Lex Fridman (2:31:31.500)

And then, so like, spend most of your time doing like amazing things you're passionate

Konstantin Batygin (2:31:35.300)

about, but such that it kind of like Planet Nine produces objects that feed your CV, like,

Lex Fridman (2:31:44.540)

slowly over time.

Konstantin Batygin (2:31:45.540)

Like getting good grades in high school, maybe doing extracurricular activities or in terms

Konstantin Batygin (2:31:50.460)

of like, you know, for programmers that's producing code that you can show up on GitHub,

Konstantin Batygin (2:31:55.100)

like leaving traces, like, throughout your efforts, such that your CV looks impressive

Lex Fridman (2:32:01.780)

to the rest of the world.

Konstantin Batygin (2:32:02.820)

In fact, I mean, this is somewhat along the lines of what I'm talking about, see, like,

Konstantin Batygin (2:32:08.500)

getting like good grades is important, but grades are not a tangible, like, product.

Konstantin Batygin (2:32:14.540)

You cannot, you know, show your A and have your A live a separate life from you.

Lex Fridman (2:32:21.620)

Code very much does, right?

Konstantin Batygin (2:32:24.260)

Music very much takes on, you know, provided somebody else listens to it, like, takes on

Lex Fridman (2:32:31.580)

a life of its own.

Lex Fridman (2:32:33.100)

That's kind of what I mean, right?

Lex Fridman (2:32:36.620)

Creating stuff that can then get separated from you is exceptionally attractive, right?

Konstantin Batygin (2:32:45.980)

It's like a fun and...

Lex Fridman (2:32:47.620)

And it's also very impressive to others.

Konstantin Batygin (2:32:50.060)

I think we're moving to a world where grades mean less and less, like certifications mean

Lex Fridman (2:32:54.740)

less and less.

Konstantin Batygin (2:32:55.900)

If you look at, especially again in the computing fields, getting a degree, finishing your,

Konstantin Batygin (2:33:02.660)

especially just finishing your degree, whether it's bachelor's or master's or PhD is less

Konstantin Batygin (2:33:07.400)

important than the things you've actually put out into the world.

Lex Fridman (2:33:11.660)

And that's a fascinating kind of, that's great that in that sense, the meritocracy is in

Konstantin Batygin (2:33:16.700)

its richest, most beautiful form is starting to win out.

Konstantin Batygin (2:33:20.860)

Yeah, it's weird because like, you know, my understanding, and I'm not like, I don't know

Konstantin Batygin (2:33:26.020)

the history of science well enough to speak very confidently about this, but, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:33:31.420)

the advisor of my advisor of my advisor from undergrad, like didn't have a PhD, right?

Lex Fridman (2:33:39.380)

So I think it was a more common thing back in the day, even in the academic sector to,

Konstantin Batygin (2:33:49.580)

you know, not have, you know, Faraday, like Faraday didn't know algebra and drew diagrams

Konstantin Batygin (2:33:56.740)

about, you know, magnetic fields and Faraday's law was derived entirely from intuition.

Lex Fridman (2:34:03.900)

So it is interesting to how the world of academia has evolved into a, you've got to do this

Lex Fridman (2:34:11.820)

and then get PhD, then you have to postdoc once and twice and maybe thrice and then like

Lex Fridman (2:34:17.620)

you move on.

Konstantin Batygin (2:34:18.820)

So, you know, it does, I do wonder, you know, if we're, you know, if there's a better approach.

Konstantin Batygin (2:34:25.580)

I think we're heading there, but it's a fascinating historical perspective, like that we might

Konstantin Batygin (2:34:29.500)

have just tried this whole thing out for a while where we put a lot more emphasis on

Lex Fridman (2:34:34.340)

grades and certificates and degrees and all those kinds of things.

Konstantin Batygin (2:34:38.100)

I think the difference historically is like we can actually, using the internet, show

Konstantin Batygin (2:34:43.860)

off ourselves and our creations better and better and more effectively, whether that's

Konstantin Batygin (2:34:51.060)

code or producing videos or all those kinds of things.

Lex Fridman (2:34:54.020)

That's right.

Konstantin Batygin (2:34:55.020)

I want to become a certified drone pilot.

Lex Fridman (2:35:00.740)

Of all the things you want to pick, yeah, for sure.

Konstantin Batygin (2:35:03.420)

Or you could just fly and make YouTube videos against hundreds of thousands of views with

Lex Fridman (2:35:06.820)

your drone and never getting a certificate.

Konstantin Batygin (2:35:10.140)

That's probably illegal.

Lex Fridman (2:35:11.140)

Don't do it.

Lex Fridman (2:35:12.140)

What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing?

Lex Fridman (2:35:14.460)

So you look at planets, they seem to orbit stuff without asking the why question.

Lex Fridman (2:35:23.100)

And for some reason, life emerged on Earth such that it led to big brains that can ask

Lex Fridman (2:35:28.140)

the big why question.

Lex Fridman (2:35:30.300)

Do you think there's an answer to it?

Lex Fridman (2:35:34.980)

I'm not sure what the question is.

Lex Fridman (2:35:37.380)

Meaning of life?

Lex Fridman (2:35:38.380)

The meaning of life.

Konstantin Batygin (2:35:40.460)

It's 42.

Lex Fridman (2:35:41.460)

It's 42.

Konstantin Batygin (2:35:42.460)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:35:43.460)

But aside from that, I think the question you're asking is why we do all this, right?

Lex Fridman (2:35:54.820)

Why we do all this.

Lex Fridman (2:35:58.220)

It's part of the human condition, right?

Konstantin Batygin (2:36:00.780)

Human beings are fundamentally, I feel like, sort of stochastic and fundamentally interested

Lex Fridman (2:36:11.300)

in kind of expanding our own understanding of the world around us.

Lex Fridman (2:36:18.060)

And creating stuff to enable that understanding.

Lex Fridman (2:36:21.640)

So we're like stochastic, fundamentally stochastic.

Lex Fridman (2:36:24.260)

So like there's just a bunch of randomness that really doesn't seem like it has a good

Konstantin Batygin (2:36:27.940)

explanation and yet there's a kind of direction to our being that we just keep wanting to

Konstantin Batygin (2:36:33.180)

create and to understand.

Lex Fridman (2:36:34.700)

That's right.

Lex Fridman (2:36:35.700)

There are people that claim to be anti science, right?

Lex Fridman (2:36:41.580)

And yet in their anti science discussion, they're like, well, if you're so scientific,

Konstantin Batygin (2:36:50.420)

then why don't you explain to me how, I don't know, this works.

Lex Fridman (2:36:54.340)

And like it always, there's that fundamental seed of curiosity and interest that is common

Konstantin Batygin (2:37:00.580)

to all of us.

Lex Fridman (2:37:02.940)

That is absolutely what makes us human, right?

Lex Fridman (2:37:08.900)

And I'm in a privileged position of being able to have that be my job, right?

Konstantin Batygin (2:37:16.980)

I think as time evolves forward and the kind of economy changes, I mean, we're already

Konstantin Batygin (2:37:26.480)

starting to see a shift towards that type of creative enterprise as taking over a bigger

Lex Fridman (2:37:36.740)

and bigger chunk of the sector.

Konstantin Batygin (2:37:39.100)

It's not yet, I think, the dominant portion of the economy by any account.

Lex Fridman (2:37:45.300)

But if we compare this to sometime when the dominant thing you would do would be to go

Konstantin Batygin (2:37:53.540)

to a factory and do the same exact thing, I think there's a tide there and things are

Lex Fridman (2:38:00.980)

sort of headed in that direction.

Konstantin Batygin (2:38:02.660)

Yeah, life's becoming more and more fun.

Lex Fridman (2:38:04.500)

I can't wait.

Lex Fridman (2:38:05.500)

Honestly, what happens next?

Lex Fridman (2:38:06.500)

I can't wait to just chill.

Konstantin Batygin (2:38:07.500)

Just chill.

Konstantin Batygin (2:38:08.500)

The terminal point of this is just chill and wait for those Kuiper Belt objects to complete

Konstantin Batygin (2:38:13.900)

one orbit.

Lex Fridman (2:38:14.900)

I'm going to credit you with this idea.

Konstantin Batygin (2:38:17.260)

I do hope that we definitively discover a proof that there is a Planet 9 out there in

Konstantin Batygin (2:38:24.020)

the next few years so you can sit back with a cigar or cigarette or vodka or wine and

Konstantin Batygin (2:38:29.700)

just say, I told you so.

Lex Fridman (2:38:32.160)

That's already happening.

Konstantin Batygin (2:38:33.160)

I'm going to do that later tonight.

Lex Fridman (2:38:36.580)

As I mentioned, confidence is essential to being a rock star.

Konstantin Batygin (2:38:40.420)

I really appreciate you explaining so many fascinating things to me today.

Konstantin Batygin (2:38:45.020)

I really appreciate the work that you do out there and I really appreciate you talking

Konstantin Batygin (2:38:50.220)

with me today.

Lex Fridman (2:38:51.220)

Thanks, Constantine.

Konstantin Batygin (2:38:52.220)

It was a pleasure.

Lex Fridman (2:38:53.220)

Thanks for having me on.

Konstantin Batygin (2:38:54.220)

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Constantine Batygin and thank you to

Lex Fridman (2:38:57.500)

Squarespace, Litterati, Onnit, And, and I.

Konstantin Batygin (2:39:02.500)

Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

Lex Fridman (2:39:06.260)

And now let me leave you with some words from Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker's Guide to

Konstantin Batygin (2:39:10.220)

the Galaxy.

Konstantin Batygin (2:39:12.300)

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm

Konstantin Batygin (2:39:18.440)

of the galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun.

Konstantin Batygin (2:39:23.980)

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly 92 million miles is an utterly insignificant

Konstantin Batygin (2:39:30.020)

little blue green planet whose ape descendant life forms are so amazingly primitive that

Lex Fridman (2:39:36.580)

they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

Konstantin Batygin (2:39:41.960)

Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Konstantin Batygin (30:00.740)

We're pretty certain that giant planets like Jupiter, when they form, they migrate.

Konstantin Batygin (30:05.080)

The reason they migrate is, you know, on a detailed level, perhaps difficult to explain,

Lex Fridman (30:11.680)

but just in a qualitative sense, they form in this fluid disk of gas and dust.

Lex Fridman (30:19.440)

So it's kind of like, okay, if I plop down a raft somewhere in the ocean, will it stay

Lex Fridman (30:27.000)

where you plop it down or will it kind of get carried around?

Konstantin Batygin (30:30.400)

It's not really a good analogy because it's not like Jupiter is being advected by the

Konstantin Batygin (30:34.880)

currents of gas and dust, but the way it migrates is it carves out a hole in the disk and then

Konstantin Batygin (30:44.640)

by interacting with the disk gravitationally, it can change its orbit.

Konstantin Batygin (30:50.040)

The fact that the solar system has both Jupiter and Saturn here complicates things a lot because

Konstantin Batygin (30:56.400)

you have to solve the problem of the evolution of the gas disk, the evolution of Jupiter's

Lex Fridman (31:02.100)

orbit in the gas disk, plus evolution of Saturn's and their mutual interaction.

Konstantin Batygin (31:08.920)

The common outcome of solving that problem, though, is pretty easy to explain.

Konstantin Batygin (31:15.800)

Jupiter forms, its orbit shrinks, and then once Saturn forms, its orbit catches up basically

Konstantin Batygin (31:22.080)

to the orbit of Jupiter and then both come out.

Lex Fridman (31:24.880)

So there's this inward outward pattern of Jupiter's early motion that happens sort of

Konstantin Batygin (31:30.840)

within the last million years of the lifetime of the solar system's primordial disk.

Lex Fridman (31:36.820)

So while this is happening, if our calculations are correct, which I think they are, you can

Konstantin Batygin (31:44.260)

destroy this inner system of, you know, few Earth mass planets.

Lex Fridman (31:51.900)

And then in the aftermath of all this violence, you form the terrestrial planets.

Lex Fridman (31:58.720)

Where would they come from in that case?

Lex Fridman (32:00.500)

So Jupiter clears out the space, and then there's a few terrestrial planets that come

Lex Fridman (32:05.640)

in and those come in from the disk somewhere, like one of the larger objects?

Lex Fridman (32:12.440)

What actually happens in these calculations, you leave behind a rather mass depleted, like

Konstantin Batygin (32:18.920)

remnant disk, only a couple Earth masses.

Lex Fridman (32:23.480)

So then from that remnant population, annulus of material, over a hundred million years,

Konstantin Batygin (32:33.000)

by just collisions, you grow the Earth and the Moon and everything else.

Lex Fridman (32:37.240)

You said annulus?

Konstantin Batygin (32:38.240)

Annulus.

Lex Fridman (32:39.240)

Annulus.

Konstantin Batygin (32:40.240)

Annulus, yeah.

Lex Fridman (32:41.240)

That's a beautiful word.

Lex Fridman (32:42.240)

What does that mean?

Lex Fridman (32:43.240)

Well, it's like a disk that's kind of thin.

Konstantin Batygin (32:45.240)

It's like a, yeah, it's something that is, you know, a disk that's so thin it's almost

Lex Fridman (32:50.800)

flirting with being a ring.

Konstantin Batygin (32:53.560)

Like I was going to say, this reminds me of Lord of the Rings, so like this, the word

Lex Fridman (32:57.280)

just feels like it belongs in a token though.

Konstantin Batygin (33:00.160)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (33:01.160)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (33:02.160)

So that's incredible.

Lex Fridman (33:03.160)

And so that, in your senses, you said like 1%, that's a rare, the way Jupiter and Saturn

Konstantin Batygin (33:09.320)

danced and cleared out the short period debris and then changed the gravitational landscape.

Lex Fridman (33:18.720)

That's a pretty rare thing too.

Konstantin Batygin (33:20.340)

It's rare.

Lex Fridman (33:21.340)

And moreover, like you don't even have to go to our calculations.

Lex Fridman (33:24.860)

You can just ask the night sky, how many stars have Jupiter and Saturn analogs?

Konstantin Batygin (33:31.200)

The answer is Jupiter and Saturn analogs are found around only 10% of Sun like stars.

Konstantin Batygin (33:36.980)

They themselves, like you kind of have to score an A minus or better on the planet formation

Lex Fridman (33:43.060)

test to become a solar system analog, even in that basic sense.

Lex Fridman (33:48.780)

And moreover, you know, lower mass stars, which are very numerous in the galaxy, so

Konstantin Batygin (33:56.560)

called M dwarfs, think like 0% of them, well, maybe like a negligible fraction of them have

Konstantin Batygin (34:03.620)

giant planets.

Lex Fridman (34:05.440)

Giant planets are a rare, you know, outcome of planet formation.

Konstantin Batygin (34:11.280)

One of the really big problems that remain unanswered is why.

Lex Fridman (34:15.040)

We don't actually understand why they're so rare.

Lex Fridman (34:18.480)

How hard is it to simulate all of the things that we've been talking about, each of the

Konstantin Batygin (34:22.440)

things we've been talking about, and maybe one day, all of the things we've been talking

Konstantin Batygin (34:27.440)

about and beyond.

Konstantin Batygin (34:28.920)

I mean, like from the initial primordial solar system, you know, a bunch of disks with, I

Konstantin Batygin (34:36.960)

don't know, billions, trillions of objects in them, like simulate that such that you

Konstantin Batygin (34:42.060)

eventually get a Jupiter and a Saturn, and then eventually you get the Jupiter and the

Konstantin Batygin (34:47.160)

Saturn that clear out a disk, change the gravitational landscape, then Earth pops up, like that whole

Konstantin Batygin (34:51.440)

thing, and then be able to do that for every other system in the, every other star in the

Konstantin Batygin (34:59.560)

galaxy, and then be able to do that for other galaxies as well.

Lex Fridman (35:04.680)

Yeah, so, look.

Konstantin Batygin (35:07.440)

Maybe start from the smallest simulation, like what is actually being done today.

Lex Fridman (35:11.320)

I mean, even the smallest simulation is probably super, super difficult.

Konstantin Batygin (35:14.520)

Even just like one object in the Kuiper belt is probably super difficult to simulate.

Lex Fridman (35:18.320)

I mean, I think it's super easy.

Konstantin Batygin (35:20.360)

I mean, like, it's just not that hard.

Lex Fridman (35:23.720)

But you know, let's ask the most kind of basic problem, okay?

Lex Fridman (35:29.680)

So the problem of having a star and something in orbit of it, that you don't need a simulation

Lex Fridman (35:36.240)

for, like you can just write that down on a piece of paper.

Konstantin Batygin (35:39.440)

There's gravity, like yeah, I guess it's important to try to, you know, one way to simulate objects

Lex Fridman (35:47.720)

in our solar system is to build the universe from scratch.

Konstantin Batygin (35:50.520)

Okay, we'll get to building the universe from scratch in a sec.

Lex Fridman (35:54.240)

But let me just kind of go through the hierarchy of what, you know, what we do.

Konstantin Batygin (35:58.560)

Two objects.

Konstantin Batygin (35:59.560)

Two objects, analytically solvable, like we can figure it out very easily if you just,

Konstantin Batygin (36:05.720)

I don't think you, yeah, you don't need to know calculus.

Lex Fridman (36:08.720)

It helps to know calculus, but you don't necessarily need to know calculus.

Konstantin Batygin (36:13.660)

Three objects that are gravitationally interacting, the solution is chaotic.

Konstantin Batygin (36:18.820)

Doesn't matter how many simulations you do, the answer loses meaning after some time.

Konstantin Batygin (36:25.280)

I feel like that is a metaphor for dating as well, but go on.

Konstantin Batygin (36:30.320)

Now look, yeah, so the fact that you go from analytically solvable to unpredictable, you

Konstantin Batygin (36:39.120)

know, when your simulation goes from two bodies to three bodies should immediately tell you

Konstantin Batygin (36:46.200)

that the exercise of trying to engineer a calculation where you form the entire solar

Lex Fridman (36:53.400)

system from scratch and hope to have some predictive answer is a futile one, right?

Lex Fridman (37:00.440)

We will never succeed at such a simulation.

Konstantin Batygin (37:03.520)

I feel like, just to clarify, you mean like explicitly having a clear equation that generalizes

Konstantin Batygin (37:09.240)

the whole process enough to be able to make a prediction, or do you mean actually like

Lex Fridman (37:13.400)

literally simulating the objects is a hopeless pursuit once it goes beyond three?

Konstantin Batygin (37:18.820)

The simulating them is not a hopeless pursuit, but the outcome becomes a statistical one.

Lex Fridman (37:26.540)

What's actually quite interesting is I think we have all the equations figured out, right?

Konstantin Batygin (37:34.400)

You know, in order to really understand this, the formation of the solar system, it suffices

Konstantin Batygin (37:39.680)

to know gravity and magnetohydrodynamics, I mean, like a combination of Maxwell's equations

Lex Fridman (37:47.240)

and Navier Stokes equations for the fluids.

Konstantin Batygin (37:50.560)

You need to know quantum mechanics to understand the capacities and so on.

Lex Fridman (37:54.800)

But we have those equations in hand.

Konstantin Batygin (37:59.220)

It's not that we don't have that understanding, it's that putting it all together is A, very,

Konstantin Batygin (38:05.240)

very difficult, and B, if you were to run the same evolution twice, changing, you know,

Konstantin Batygin (38:13.660)

the initial conditions by some infinitesimal amount, some, you know, minor change in your

Lex Fridman (38:19.240)

calculation to start with, you would get a different answer.

Konstantin Batygin (38:23.240)

This is one, this is part of the reason why planetary systems are so diverse.

Konstantin Batygin (38:29.720)

You don't have like a, you know, very predictive path for you start with a disk of this mass

Lex Fridman (38:36.740)

and it's around this star, therefore you're going to form the solar system, right?

Konstantin Batygin (38:42.400)

You start with this and therefore you will conform this huge outcome, huge set of outcomes,

Lex Fridman (38:47.620)

and some percentage of it will resemble the solar system.

Lex Fridman (38:50.720)

You mentioned quantum mechanics and we're talking about cosmic scale objects.

Konstantin Batygin (38:57.600)

You've talked about that the evolution of astrophysical disks can be modeled with Schrodinger's

Lex Fridman (39:02.680)

equation.

Konstantin Batygin (39:03.680)

I sure did.

Lex Fridman (39:04.680)

Why?

Konstantin Batygin (39:05.680)

Like, how does quantum mechanics become relevant when you consider the evolution of objects

Lex Fridman (39:14.520)

in the solar system?

Konstantin Batygin (39:15.520)

Yeah.

Konstantin Batygin (39:16.520)

Well, let me take a step back and just say, like, I remember being, you know, utterly

Konstantin Batygin (39:22.680)

confused by quantum mechanics when I first learned it.

Lex Fridman (39:26.880)

And the Schrodinger equation, which is kind of the parent equation of that whole field,

Lex Fridman (39:32.680)

you know, seems to come out of nowhere, right?

Konstantin Batygin (39:35.400)

The way that I was sort of explaining it, I remember asking, you know, my professor

Lex Fridman (39:40.800)

is like, but where does it come from?

Lex Fridman (39:42.840)

And I'm like, well, it's just like, don't worry about it and just like calculate the

Lex Fridman (39:47.520)

hydrogen, you know, energy levels, right?

Lex Fridman (39:50.280)

So it's like I could do all the problems.

Konstantin Batygin (39:52.320)

I just did not have any intuition for where this parent, you know, super important equation

Lex Fridman (39:58.680)

came from.

Konstantin Batygin (39:59.680)

Now, down the line, I was, remember, I was preparing for my own lecture and I was trying

Lex Fridman (40:04.360)

to understand how waves travel in self gravitating disks.

Lex Fridman (40:09.960)

So you know, again, there's a very broad theory that's already developed, but I was looking

Lex Fridman (40:17.320)

for some simpler way to explain it really for the purposes of teaching class.

Lex Fridman (40:22.760)

And so I thought, okay, what if I just imagine a disk as an infinite number of concentric

Lex Fridman (40:30.520)

circles, right?

Konstantin Batygin (40:31.520)

That interact with each other gravitationally.

Konstantin Batygin (40:36.480)

That's a problem in some sense that I can solve using methods from like the late 1700s.

Konstantin Batygin (40:44.560)

I can write down Hamiltonian, well, I can write down the energy function basically of

Lex Fridman (40:49.440)

their interactions.

Lex Fridman (40:51.840)

And what I found is that when you take the continuum limit, when you go from discrete

Konstantin Batygin (40:59.500)

circles that are talking to each other gravitationally to a continuum disk, suddenly this gravitational

Lex Fridman (41:07.920)

interaction among them, right?

Lex Fridman (41:10.760)

The governing equation becomes the Schrodinger equation.

Konstantin Batygin (41:14.200)

I had to think about that for a little bit.

Lex Fridman (41:15.800)

Did you just unify quantum mechanics and gravity?

Konstantin Batygin (41:19.560)

No, this is not the same thing as like, you know, fusing relativity and quantum mechanics.

Lex Fridman (41:25.720)

But it did get me thinking a little bit.

Lex Fridman (41:29.520)

So the fact that waves in astrophysical disks behave just like wave functions of particles

Konstantin Batygin (41:37.920)

is kind of like an interesting analogy because for me it's easier to imagine waves traveling

Konstantin Batygin (41:43.520)

through, you know, astrophysical disks or really just sheets of paper.

Lex Fridman (41:48.480)

And the reason this is, that analogy exists is because there's actually nothing quantum

Konstantin Batygin (41:55.320)

about the Schrodinger equation.

Konstantin Batygin (41:57.280)

The Schrodinger equation is just a wave equation and all of the interpretation that comes from

Konstantin Batygin (42:04.320)

it is quantum, but the equation itself is not a quantum being.

Lex Fridman (42:11.000)

So you can use it to model waves.

Konstantin Batygin (42:14.320)

It's not turtles.

Lex Fridman (42:15.320)

It's waves all the way down.

Konstantin Batygin (42:16.320)

You can pick which level you pick the wave at.

Lex Fridman (42:19.000)

So it could be at the solar system level that you can use it.

Lex Fridman (42:22.160)

And also it actually provides a pretty neat calculational tool because it's difficult.

Lex Fridman (42:28.800)

So we just talked about simulations, but it's difficult to simulate the behavior of astrophysical

Konstantin Batygin (42:34.160)

disks on timescales that are in between a few orbits and their entire evolution.

Lex Fridman (42:42.360)

So it's over a timescale of a few orbits, you have, you do a hydrodynamic, you know,

Lex Fridman (42:48.320)

simulation, right?

Konstantin Batygin (42:49.320)

You do that, basically that's something that you can do on a modern computer on a timescale

Konstantin Batygin (42:55.120)

of say a week.

Konstantin Batygin (42:56.700)

When it comes to their evolution over their entire lifetime, you don't hope to resolve

Konstantin Batygin (43:01.400)

the orbits.

Lex Fridman (43:02.400)

You just kind of hope to understand how the system behaves in between, right?

Konstantin Batygin (43:07.200)

To get access to that, as it turns out, it's pretty, it's pretty cute.

Konstantin Batygin (43:11.540)

You can use, you can use the Schrodinger equation to get the answer rapidly, so it's a calculational

Konstantin Batygin (43:16.860)

tool.

Lex Fridman (43:17.860)

That's fascinating.

Lex Fridman (43:18.860)

So astrophysical disks, how, what are they?

Lex Fridman (43:22.440)

How broad is this definition?

Konstantin Batygin (43:23.680)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (43:24.680)

So astrophysical disks span a huge, huge amount of ranges.

Konstantin Batygin (43:31.280)

They start maybe at the smallest scale.

Lex Fridman (43:33.800)

They start with actually Kuiper belt objects.

Konstantin Batygin (43:35.840)

Some Kuiper belt objects have rings.

Lex Fridman (43:38.620)

So that's maybe the smallest example of an astrophysical disk.

Konstantin Batygin (43:42.200)

You've got this little potato shaped asteroid, you know, which is, you know, sort of the

Lex Fridman (43:47.520)

size of LA or something, and around it are some rings of icy matter.

Konstantin Batygin (43:53.360)

That object is a small astrophysical disk.

Lex Fridman (43:57.040)

Then you have Saturn, the rings of Saturn.

Konstantin Batygin (43:59.820)

You have the next set of scale, you have the solar system itself when it was forming, you

Lex Fridman (44:03.960)

have a disk.

Konstantin Batygin (44:04.960)

Then you have black hole disks.

Lex Fridman (44:07.540)

You have galaxies.

Konstantin Batygin (44:09.840)

Disks are super common in the universe.

Lex Fridman (44:12.280)

The reason is that stuff rotates, right?

Konstantin Batygin (44:15.680)

I mean, that's...

Lex Fridman (44:16.680)

Yeah.

Konstantin Batygin (44:17.680)

So, and those rings could be the material that composes those rings could be, it could

Lex Fridman (44:24.320)

be gas, it could be solid, it could be anything.

Konstantin Batygin (44:27.240)

That's right.

Konstantin Batygin (44:28.240)

So, the disk that made from which the planets emerged was predominantly hydrogen, helium,

Konstantin Batygin (44:35.400)

gas.

Konstantin Batygin (44:36.400)

On the other hand, the rings of Saturn are made up of, you know, icicle, ice, little

Konstantin Batygin (44:41.420)

like ice cubes this big, about a centimeter across.

Lex Fridman (44:47.200)

Sounds refreshing.

Konstantin Batygin (44:48.200)

So, that's incredible.

Lex Fridman (44:49.200)

Hydrogen, helium, gas.

Konstantin Batygin (44:50.720)

So, in the beginning, it was just hydrogen and helium around the sun.

Lex Fridman (44:55.980)

How does that lead to the first formations of solid objects in terms of simulation?

Konstantin Batygin (45:01.760)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (45:02.760)

Here's the story.

Lex Fridman (45:03.760)

So, you're like, have you ever been to the desert?

Lex Fridman (45:06.760)

Yes.

Konstantin Batygin (45:07.760)

I've been to the Death Valley and actually it was terrifying, just a total tangent, I'm

Lex Fridman (45:12.240)

distracting you.

Konstantin Batygin (45:13.240)

No.

Lex Fridman (45:14.240)

But I was driving through it and I was really surprised because it was, at first, hot.

Lex Fridman (45:19.360)

And then as it was getting into the evening, there's this huge thunderstorm, like it was

Lex Fridman (45:23.920)

raining and it got freezing cold.

Lex Fridman (45:25.800)

I'm like, what the hell?

Lex Fridman (45:26.800)

It was the apocalypse.

Konstantin Batygin (45:27.800)

Yes.

Konstantin Batygin (45:28.800)

I had to like just sit there listening to Bruce Springsteen, I remember, and just thinking,

Konstantin Batygin (45:33.420)

I'm probably going to die and I was okay with it because Bruce Springsteen was on the radio.

Lex Fridman (45:37.720)

But look, when you've got the boss, you're ready to meet the boss.

Konstantin Batygin (45:42.000)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (45:43.000)

So, look, I mean.

Konstantin Batygin (45:44.000)

That's a good line.

Lex Fridman (45:45.000)

Anyway, sorry.

Konstantin Batygin (45:46.000)

That does, yes.

Lex Fridman (45:47.000)

It's true.

Konstantin Batygin (45:48.000)

Yeah.

Konstantin Batygin (45:49.000)

By the way, to continue on this tangent, I absolutely love the Southwest for this reason.

Konstantin Batygin (45:57.800)

During the pandemic, I drove from LA to New Mexico a bunch of times.

Lex Fridman (46:02.400)

The madness of weather?

Konstantin Batygin (46:03.640)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (46:04.640)

The chaos.

Konstantin Batygin (46:05.640)

The madness of weather, the fact that it will be blazing hot one minute and then it's just

Konstantin Batygin (46:09.800)

like, we'll decide to have a little thunderstorm, maybe we'll decide to go back momentarily

Konstantin Batygin (46:15.680)

to like a thousand degrees and then go back to the thunderstorm.

Lex Fridman (46:19.200)

It's amazing.

Konstantin Batygin (46:20.200)

It's that, by the way, is chaos theory in action.

Lex Fridman (46:23.560)

Right.

Lex Fridman (46:24.560)

But let's get back to talking about the desert.

Konstantin Batygin (46:26.800)

So, in the desert, tumbleweeds have a tendency to roll because the wind rolls them.

Lex Fridman (46:33.880)

And if you're careful, you'll occasionally see this family of tumbleweeds where there's

Konstantin Batygin (46:38.600)

like a big one and then a bunch of little ones that kind of hide in its wake and are

Konstantin Batygin (46:44.800)

all rolling together and almost looks like a family of ducks crossing the street or something.

Konstantin Batygin (46:51.440)

Or for example, if you watch Tour de France, you've got a whole bunch of cyclists and they're

Konstantin Batygin (46:58.320)

like cycling within 10 centimeters of each other.

Lex Fridman (47:01.900)

They're not BFFs, right?

Konstantin Batygin (47:03.960)

They're not trying to be, trying to ride together.

Konstantin Batygin (47:07.380)

They are riding together to minimize the collective air resistance, if you will, that they experience.

Konstantin Batygin (47:16.360)

Turns out solids in the protoplanetary disk do just this.

Konstantin Batygin (47:21.960)

There's an instability wherein solid particles, things that are a centimeter across will start

Konstantin Batygin (47:30.040)

to hide behind one another and form these clouds.

Lex Fridman (47:33.800)

Why?

Konstantin Batygin (47:34.920)

Because cumulatively, that minimizes the solid component of this aerodynamic interaction

Lex Fridman (47:42.180)

with the gas.

Konstantin Batygin (47:43.180)

Now, these clouds, because they're kind of a favorable energetic condition for the dust

Konstantin Batygin (47:49.560)

to live in, they grow, grow, grow, grow, grow until they become so massive that they collapse

Konstantin Batygin (47:54.980)

under their own weight.

Lex Fridman (47:56.860)

That's how the first building blocks of planets form.

Konstantin Batygin (47:59.680)

That's how the big asteroids got there.

Lex Fridman (48:02.520)

That's incredible.

Konstantin Batygin (48:03.520)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (48:04.520)

So that, is that simulatable or is it not useful to simulate?

Konstantin Batygin (48:06.880)

No, no, that's simulatable.

Lex Fridman (48:09.500)

And people do these types of calculations.

Konstantin Batygin (48:12.520)

It's really cool.

Konstantin Batygin (48:13.680)

That's actually, that's one of the many fields of planet formation theory that is really,

Konstantin Batygin (48:18.800)

really active right now.

Konstantin Batygin (48:20.300)

People are trying to understand all kinds of aspects of that process because of course

Konstantin Batygin (48:24.640)

I've explained it, you know, like as if there's one thing that happens.

Konstantin Batygin (48:29.320)

Turns out it's a beautifully rich dynamic, but qualitatively, formation of the first

Lex Fridman (48:37.820)

building blocks actually follows the same sequence as formation of stars, right?

Konstantin Batygin (48:42.580)

Stars are just clouds of gas, hydrogen, helium, gas that sit in space and slowly cool.

Lex Fridman (48:50.600)

And at some point they, you know, contract to a point where their gravity overtakes the

Lex Fridman (48:57.440)

thermal pressure support, if you will.

Lex Fridman (49:00.160)

And they collapse under their own weight and you get a little baby solar system.

Lex Fridman (49:03.680)

That's amazing.

Lex Fridman (49:04.680)

So do you think one day it will be possible to simulate the full history that took our

Lex Fridman (49:11.780)

solar system to what it is today?

Konstantin Batygin (49:14.560)

Yes.

Lex Fridman (49:15.880)

And it will be useless.

Konstantin Batygin (49:16.880)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (49:17.880)

So you don't think your story, many of the ideas that you have about Jupiter clear in

Konstantin Batygin (49:22.400)

the space, like retelling that story in high resolution is not that important.

Konstantin Batygin (49:26.760)

I actually think it's important, but at every stage you have to design your experiments,

Konstantin Batygin (49:36.280)

your numerical computer experiments so that they test some specific aspect of that evolution.

Konstantin Batygin (49:44.420)

I am not a proponent of doing huge simulations because even if we forget the information

Konstantin Batygin (49:53.300)

theory aspect of not being able to simulate in full detail the universe, because if you

Lex Fridman (50:00.280)

do, then you have made an actual universe.

Lex Fridman (50:05.260)

It's not the simulation, right?

Lex Fridman (50:07.920)

Simulation is in some sense a compression of information.

Lex Fridman (50:10.480)

So therefore you must lose detail.

Lex Fridman (50:13.520)

But that point aside, if we are able to simulate the entire history of the solar system in

Konstantin Batygin (50:22.280)

excruciating detail, I mean, it'll be cool, but it's not going to be any different from

Lex Fridman (50:28.920)

observing it, right?

Konstantin Batygin (50:31.820)

Because theoretical understanding, which is what ultimately I'm interested in, comes from

Konstantin Batygin (50:38.840)

taking complex things and reducing them down to something that, you know, some mechanism

Konstantin Batygin (50:45.400)

that you can actually quantify.

Konstantin Batygin (50:49.060)

That's the fun part of astrophysics, just kind of simulating things in extreme detail

Konstantin Batygin (50:54.280)

is we'll make cool visualizations, but that doesn't get you to any better understanding

Lex Fridman (51:02.240)

than you had before you did the simulation.

Lex Fridman (51:04.800)

So if you ask very specific questions, then you'll be able to create like very highly

Konstantin Batygin (51:10.720)

compressed, nice, beautiful theories about how things evolved, and then you can use those

Konstantin Batygin (51:15.560)

to then generalize to other solar systems, to other stars and other galaxies, and then

Lex Fridman (51:21.200)

say something generalizable about the entire universe.

Lex Fridman (51:24.880)

How difficult would it be to simulate our solar system such that we would not know the

Lex Fridman (51:31.240)

difference?

Konstantin Batygin (51:32.240)

Meaning, if we are living in a simulation, is there a nice, think of it as a video game,

Konstantin Batygin (51:38.960)

is there a nice compressible way of doing that, or just kind of like you intuited with

Konstantin Batygin (51:43.720)

a three body situation is just a giant mess that you cannot create a video game that will

Lex Fridman (51:51.240)

seem realistic without actually building your solar system from scratch?

Konstantin Batygin (51:56.960)

I'm speculating, but one of the, yeah, I know you have a deep understanding of this, but

Konstantin Batygin (52:04.760)

for me, I'm just going to speculate that for at least in the types of simulations that

Lex Fridman (52:11.960)

we can do today, inevitably, you run into the problem of resolution, right?

Lex Fridman (52:19.120)

Doesn't matter what you're doing, it is discrete.

Konstantin Batygin (52:22.000)

Now, the way you would go about asking, you know, what we're observing, is that a simulation

Lex Fridman (52:28.240)

or is that, you know, some real continuous thing, is you zoom in, right?

Konstantin Batygin (52:35.520)

You zoom in and try and find the, you know, the grid scale, if you will.

Konstantin Batygin (52:42.320)

Yeah, I mean, it's a really interesting question, and because the solar system itself and really,

Lex Fridman (52:55.880)

you know, the double pendulum is chaotic, right?

Lex Fridman (52:59.200)

From sitting on another pendulum, it moves unpredictably once you let them go.

Konstantin Batygin (53:06.960)

You really don't need to, like, inject any randomness into a simulation for it to give

Lex Fridman (53:12.520)

you stochastic and unpredictable answers.

Konstantin Batygin (53:16.200)

Weather is a great example of this.

Konstantin Batygin (53:18.540)

Weather has a lapen of time of, you know, typical weather systems have a lapen of time

Konstantin Batygin (53:23.680)

of a few days.

Lex Fridman (53:25.040)

And there's a fundamental reason why the force forecast always sucks, you know, two weeks

Konstantin Batygin (53:30.760)

in advance.

Konstantin Batygin (53:32.160)

It's not that we don't know the equations that govern the atmosphere, we know them well.

Konstantin Batygin (53:39.200)

Their solutions are meaningless, though, after a few days.

Lex Fridman (53:42.520)

The zooming in thing is very interesting.

Konstantin Batygin (53:45.160)

I think about this a lot, whether there'll be a time soon where we would want to stay

Lex Fridman (53:51.640)

in video game worlds, whether it's virtual reality or just playing video games.

Konstantin Batygin (53:55.560)

I mean, I think that time, like, came in, like, the 90s, and it's been that time.

Lex Fridman (54:01.560)

Well, it's not just came, I mean, it's accelerated.

Konstantin Batygin (54:05.040)

I just recently saw that WoW and Fortnite were played 140 billion hours, and those are

Lex Fridman (54:12.080)

just video games.

Lex Fridman (54:13.340)

And that's, like, increasing very, very quickly, especially with the people coming up now,

Lex Fridman (54:17.640)

being born now and become, you know, becoming teenagers and so on.

Konstantin Batygin (54:21.840)

Let's have a thought experiment where it's just you and a video game character inside

Konstantin Batygin (54:25.240)

a room, where you remove the simulation, they need to simulate sort of a lot of objects.

Konstantin Batygin (54:33.120)

If it's just you and that character, how far do you need to simulate in terms of zooming

Lex Fridman (54:39.200)

in for it to be very real to you, as real as reality?

Lex Fridman (54:43.920)

So like, first of all, you kind of mentioned zooming in, which is fascinating, because

Konstantin Batygin (54:48.680)

we have these tools of science that allow us to zoom in, quote unquote, in all kinds

Konstantin Batygin (54:53.440)

of ways in the world around us.

Lex Fridman (54:57.260)

But our cognitive abilities, like our perception system as humans, is very limited in terms

Konstantin Batygin (55:01.760)

of zooming in.

Lex Fridman (55:02.760)

So we might be very easily fooled.

Lex Fridman (55:04.600)

Some of the video games, like, on the PS4, like, look pretty real to me, right?

Konstantin Batygin (55:11.680)

I think, you know, you would really have to interrogate, I mean, I think even with what

Lex Fridman (55:16.520)

we have today, like, I don't know, Ace Combat 7 is a great example, right?

Konstantin Batygin (55:22.680)

Like, I mean, the way that the clouds are rendered, it's, I mean, it looks just like

Konstantin Batygin (55:29.360)

when you're flying, you know, on a real airplane, the kind of transparency.

Konstantin Batygin (55:34.120)

I think that the, you know, our perception is limited enough already to not be able to

Konstantin Batygin (55:41.680)

tell some of the, you know, some of the differences.

Lex Fridman (55:46.400)

There's a game called Skyrim.

Konstantin Batygin (55:48.580)

It's an Elder Scrolls role playing game.

Lex Fridman (55:51.640)

And I just, I played it for quite a bit.

Lex Fridman (55:55.240)

And I think I played it very different than others.

Konstantin Batygin (55:58.640)

Like, there'll be long stretches of time where I would just walk around and look at nature

Konstantin Batygin (56:03.180)

in the game.

Lex Fridman (56:04.180)

It's incredible.

Konstantin Batygin (56:05.180)

Oh, sure.

Lex Fridman (56:06.320)

It's just like the graphics is like, wow, I want to stay there.

Konstantin Batygin (56:10.320)

It was better.

Lex Fridman (56:11.320)

I went hiking recently.

Konstantin Batygin (56:12.320)

It was like as good as hiking.

Lex Fridman (56:14.880)

So look, I know what you mean.

Konstantin Batygin (56:16.240)

Not to go on a huge video game, you know, tangent, but like the third, like, Witcher

Lex Fridman (56:21.480)

game was astonishingly beautiful, right?

Konstantin Batygin (56:25.600)

Especially like playing on a good hardware machine, it's like, this is pretty, this is

Lex Fridman (56:31.560)

pretty legit.

Konstantin Batygin (56:32.820)

That said, um, you know, I, I don't resonate with the, I want to stay here, you know, like

Konstantin Batygin (56:40.560)

one of the things that I love to do is to go to my like boxing gym and, and box with

Konstantin Batygin (56:47.840)

a guy.

Lex Fridman (56:48.840)

Right.

Konstantin Batygin (56:49.840)

Like that's, there's, there's nothing quite like that physical, you know, experience.

Lex Fridman (56:54.080)

Like

Konstantin Batygin (56:55.080)

that's fascinating.

Konstantin Batygin (56:56.080)

That might be simply an artifact of the year you were born maybe because if you're born

Konstantin Batygin (57:00.960)

today, it almost seems like stupid to go to a gym, like you're going to a gym to box with

Lex Fridman (57:07.720)

a guy.

Lex Fridman (57:08.720)

Why not box with Mike Tyson when you yourself is like in his prime, when you yourself are

Lex Fridman (57:13.520)

also an incredible boxer in the video game world.

Konstantin Batygin (57:16.040)

For me, there, there's a multitude of reasons why I don't want to box with Mike Tyson.

Lex Fridman (57:21.240)

Right.

Konstantin Batygin (57:22.240)

No, no, no, no.

Lex Fridman (57:23.240)

I enjoy teeth, you know, and I want to have an ear.

Konstantin Batygin (57:26.280)

No, but your, your skills in this meat space, in this physical realm is very limited and

Konstantin Batygin (57:31.440)

takes a lot of work and you're, you're a musician, you're an incredible scientist.

Konstantin Batygin (57:37.520)

You only have so much time in the, in the day, but in the video game world, you can

Konstantin Batygin (57:42.040)

expand your capabilities and all kinds of dimensions that you can never have possibly

Konstantin Batygin (57:47.080)

have time in the physical world.

Lex Fridman (57:48.640)

And so that, it doesn't make sense like to, to be existing, to be working your ass off

Konstantin Batygin (57:54.780)

in the physical world when you can just be super successful in the video game world.

Lex Fridman (58:01.480)

But I still, you enjoy sucking and stuff.

Konstantin Batygin (58:04.000)

Yeah, I really struggling to get better.

Lex Fridman (58:06.320)

I sure do.

Lex Fridman (58:07.320)

I mean, I think like these days with music, music is a great example, right?

Konstantin Batygin (58:12.420)

We just started, you know, practicing live with my band again, you know, after not playing

Konstantin Batygin (58:18.560)

for a year and you know, it's just, it was terrible.

Konstantin Batygin (58:22.680)

Like it was just kind of a lot of the nuance, you know, a lot of the detail is just that

Konstantin Batygin (58:28.160)

detail that takes, you know, years of collective practice to develop.

Konstantin Batygin (58:33.160)

It's just lost, but it was just an incredible amount of fun, way more fun than all the like

Konstantin Batygin (58:39.560)

studio, you know, sitting around and playing that I did, you know, throughout the entire

Lex Fridman (58:44.680)

year.

Lex Fridman (58:45.680)

So I think there's something, there's something intangible or maybe, maybe tangible about

Lex Fridman (58:50.560)

being, being in person.

Konstantin Batygin (58:54.120)

I sure hope you're wrong and that, you know, we, that's not something that will get lost

Konstantin Batygin (58:59.120)

because I think there's like such a large part of the human condition is to hang out.

Lex Fridman (59:06.200)

If we were doing this interview on zoom, right?

Lex Fridman (59:11.040)

I mean, I'd already be, I'd already be bored out of my mind.

Konstantin Batygin (59:15.480)

Exactly.

Lex Fridman (59:16.480)

I mean, there's something to that.

Konstantin Batygin (59:18.280)

I mean, I'm almost playing devil's advocate, but at the same time, you know, I'm sure people

Konstantin Batygin (59:22.440)

talk about the same way at the beginning of the 20th century about horses, where they're,

Konstantin Batygin (59:28.200)

they are much more efficient, they're much easier to maintain than cars.

Konstantin Batygin (59:34.320)

It doesn't make sense to have, you know, all the ways that cars break down and there's

Konstantin Batygin (59:37.780)

not enough infrastructure in terms of roads for cars.

Lex Fridman (59:40.360)

It doesn't make any sense.

Konstantin Batygin (59:41.720)

Like horses and like nature, you could do the nature, like where, you know, you should

Lex Fridman (59:45.800)

be living more natural life.

Konstantin Batygin (59:47.480)

Horses are real.

Konstantin Batygin (59:48.480)

You don't want machines in your life that are going to pollute your mind and the minds

Konstantin Batygin (59:51.600)

of young people, but then eventually just cars took over.

Lex Fridman (59:54.380)

So in that same way, it just seems, going back to horses, I'm just, you know, well,