#358 - Astrophysicist on 3i Atlas, NASA Moon Mission & Intelligent Life | David Kipping

Summary

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Julian Dorey Podcast #358

"Astrophysicist on 3i Atlas, NASA Moon Mission & Intelligent Life"

Guest: Dr. David Kipping | Date: November 21, 2025
Host: Julian Dorey

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Main Theme / Purpose

Renowned astrophysicist Dr. David Kipping joins Julian Dorey for a wide-ranging deep dive into high-profile astronomical events, focusing on the trending "3i Atlas" object, NASA’s evolving Moon ambitions, intelligent life, exoplanet research, and the very fabric of reality. The discussion demystifies buzzworthy claims about possible alien spacecraft, dissects the scientific process behind these discoveries, and explores theoretical questions about multiverse, time, planetary habitability, and humanity's place in the cosmos.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What Is 3i Atlas and Why the Hype?

• 3i Atlas = "Third Interstellar Object Atlas," a recently discovered object believed to have originated outside our solar system.
  • The first: Oumuamua (2017, cigar or pancake-shaped).
  • The second: 2I/Borisov (comet-like).
  • 3i Atlas is considered comet-like, large, moving unusually fast, and has drawn speculation—including from Harvard’s Avi Loeb—that it could be an alien artifact.
• Why the public buzz?
  • “It’s kind of become like this viral thing. … It’s actually not so much the scientific community.” (David Kipping, 01:22)
  • Celebrities like Kim Kardashian have tweeted about it, heightening public anxiety.
  • Dr. Kipping welcomes public interest but cautions that misunderstood scientific data can easily spiral into sensationalism and panic.

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2. Interstellar Objects — Scientific Context

• Interstellar objects are debris ejected from other star systems during their chaotic planet formation, roaming the galaxy.
• Discoveries:
  • Only expected to see these perhaps once a decade, yet three have been found in just a few years (“partly because telescopes have improved,” 05:16).
  • The frequencies of such discoveries are still full of guesswork.
  • The solar system is itself “not a typical solar system… many things about it which are odd.” (06:59)

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3. Dissecting the "Anomalies”: Is 3i Atlas Alien?

Avi Loeb’s List of 10 Anomalies (08:17–127:39)

David and Julian work through Avi Loeb's claimed evidence for 3i Atlas as an alien craft, debunking each point.

a. Anomaly Examples:

• Unusual trajectory along the solar system’s ecliptic (09:01)
  • Kipping: It’s a selection bias—surveys look in the plane where solar system comets are, so that’s where we’re most likely to find anything, interstellar or not.
  • “Millions and millions of… 1% anomalies. So to me this isn’t… you definitely wouldn’t be like, oh, it has to be aliens.” (10:25)
• Anti-tail (sunward jet), not an optical illusion (11:19–14:58)
  • Seen in previous comets, especially when far from the Sun.
• Extreme mass, high speed (19:54–20:42)
  • Mass estimates are highly uncertain and contested within the planetary science community.
  • If the object is as massive as claimed, its discovery would be statistically shocking for “natural” interstellar comets, but mass estimates are unreliable.
• Close approaches to certain planets ("fine-tuned" trajectory) (64:48)
  • Kipping: A clear case of “p-hacking” statistical artifacts; this approach can make anything seem surprising.
• Odd chemical abundances (nickel vs. iron) (70:02)
  • Could be explained by observing the comet at an unusual time/distance.
  • Our sample size of interstellar comets is much too small to say what is “normal.”
• Coincidence with 'Wow! Signal' direction (122:01)
  • “Nine degrees is a lot” in cosmic terms; not convincing.

“If it stopped, if it shined a laser beam at us or something, sent a radio emission at us—I'd be down with it. But… everything on this list is very much what comets do.”
— David Kipping, 126:39

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4. Scientific Disputes, Public Hype, and the Alien Narrative

• Kipping urges caution against leaping to “it’s aliens!” for every anomaly, emphasizing science’s need for extraordinary evidence.
• Disinformation and viral pseudoscience risks “setting the seriousness of the conversation back” (112:18).
• Kipping: It’s critical for scientists to keep open minds while adhering to disciplined process, and to communicate findings responsibly.

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5. Deeper Cosmic Questions

Black Holes, Multiverse, and the Nature of Reality

• Black holes as "cheat codes" to reality. Event horizons, time dilation, and Hawking radiation.
• Multiverse: The philosophical implications of “many worlds,” quantum immortality, simulation theory discussed (see 51:20–57:29).
  • “There are some credible reasons to believe in a multiverse as well…” (160:26)
• Time travel: Forward is possible; backward, not so much—universe appears to “destroy” time machines as soon as they’re activated (171:20).

Habitability and Astrobiology

• Exoplanet discoveries, search for habitable worlds (Trappist-1 system), exomoons, atmospheric analysis via transit method (135:35–144:03).
• “If we could intercept [an interstellar object]… there could be simple life buried inside this thing.” (115:53)
• Discusses O2 as a biosignature and the importance of moons for habitability.

Should We Build Messages for Future Civilizations?

• Physical beacons on the Moon or Mars might be the only effective long-term communication: “It’s not two-way—it’s one-way, the same way the pyramids are a form of communication.” (83:45–90:39)
• “New York City would last for a few million years and then there’d be no trace left.” (85:27)
• The Moon is a better long-term archive, lacking weathering and geological activity.

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6. NASA, SpaceX, and the Politics of Space Exploration

• NASA’s budget for science is small compared to total; risk of large investments like James Webb Telescope (31:10–33:11).
• Collaboration with private sector (SpaceX, Blue Origin): “If the private industry can pull down those costs… I’m 100% in favor of that.” (177:49)
• Societal value of pure science: “Why do we do science? Fundamentally, I don’t think it’s that different from why we do art. … it’s what makes us human beings.” (179:49–183:32)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the scientific process:
  “It’s easy to back engineer these crazy low probabilities... P-hacking is banned in most journals in science to do this.”
  (David Kipping, 66:48)

• On extraordinary claims:
  “If it stopped in space or went backwards—that’s not natural. Then we'd be like, that has to be a ship. … Everything it’s doing is what asteroids and comets do.”
  (Kipping, 68:27; 127:39)

• On the power of the telescope:
  “The James Webb telescope is wild to me. Like the fact human beings invented something like that, that can see... the images are insane.”
  (Julian, 29:54)

• On pushing scientific boundaries:
  “You have to fly close to the sun to really advance. Maybe in this case… the wings are melting off [Avi Loeb]. But… we should keep giving the dude a chance… with evidence, to push the envelope.”
  (Kipping, 132:24)

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Select Timestamps for Important Segments

• Explanation of 3i Atlas and recent interstellar object discoveries: 02:36–05:53
• Avi Loeb’s anomaly list and Kipping’s point-by-point debunk: 09:01–127:39
• Statistical p-hacking and selection bias explained: 64:48–68:27
• Atmospheric and chemical analyses of comets/exoplanets: 70:02–73:09; 135:35–144:25
• Discussion about black holes, time, and the multiverse: 38:08–57:29
• Philosophical implications (quantum immortality, simulation theory): 51:20–57:29
• NASA, private sector, and the future of space funding: 177:49–183:32

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Tone and Language

Both Julian and Kipping keep the conversation lively, enthusiastic, and accessible, peppering technical clarity with humor, pop culture references, and candid skepticism. Kipping is generous in explaining complexities, careful to distinguish between hypothesis, speculation, and established scientific knowledge.

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For Listeners: Why This Episode Matters

• Disentangles science from viral hype on “alien” interstellar objects.
• Illuminates the process—and hurdles—of serious UFO or alien detection claims.
• Explores fascinating frontiers: planetary habitability, interstellar objects as messengers, the multiverse, and human legacy in space.
• Highlights the societal and philosophical importance of curiosity-driven science.

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For more from Dr. David Kipping: Visit Cool Worlds (YouTube/Columbia University).

Transcript

[David Kipping]

Because the universe is stretching and expanding. There's a few anomalies in particular, especially 3A Atlas. There's a case that this could be an alien spacecraft that's passing through the solar system. The other thing that's weird about this object is moves really fast. You shouldn't expect to see that one every million years or so. And yet we've caught it within the span of like 3 or 4 years of looking for these things. And so Abby's making the point that if this really is that big, it basically means it can't be natural. NASA's budget is about $25 billion a year, but of course only a fraction of that goes to building telescopes. Some people are freaking out right now.

[Joe Rogan]

In the science community.

[David Kipping]

We'll get into it. But there's something about black holes that are like a cheat code to reality itself. There's these holes that punch through space and time. I'd be quite tempted to throw myself into a black hole just to like, see. I've heard wilder ideas. Yeah, like say I was falling back, you were watching from a spaceship until the, literally the end of the universe itself. He'd be stuck there. And there are some credible reasons to believe in a multiverse as well. And the first one.

[Joe Rogan]

Hey guys, if you not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. Is this three Eye Atlas gonna kill us? What's going on?

[David Kipping]

It, it could do. No, I, I, I'm not too worried. I'm not too worried. Some people are, some people are freaking out right now.

[Joe Rogan]

Who's freaking out about it? Like in the science community.

[David Kipping]

You know what, it's amazing. It's kind of become like this viral thing. It's actually not so much the scientific community. Scientists are definitely interested in it as well. But this one's really broken through in terms of pop culture. Right. You've got celebrities tweeting about. Kim Kardashian was like tweeting about 3Atlas the other day. So you've got, you know, people are getting, all over the world are getting really engaged about it and it's kind of a double edged sword. You know, it's great because when people are talking about science, as a scientist, I'm always excited about that. But no, we'll get into it. But there's a lot of confusing, conflating information about it as well. And so some people are panicking that their lives are going to end. And other people, maybe the scientists are more like, you guys maybe don't need to stress out too much. So there's a lot. There's a lot to say about this subject.

[Joe Rogan]

All right, well, let's unpack it because I know, like, Professor Avi Loeb has been going on some podcasts. I believe he just did Joe Rogan again.

[David Kipping]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

To talk about this, and I haven't had a chance to listen to that and, like, what the overall take is. I've seen the Cliff Notes of it. Like, oh, could it be something from another planet of the. Of another species or something? That's a little beyond me. But for people out there who don't know anything about this and just want a basic understanding minus, like a Kim Kardashian tweet. What. What are we referring to when we talk about three eye Atlas?

[David Kipping]

Yeah, so three atlas, three I means third interstellar object. So we've detected three of them so far. The first one was Oumuamua, which is Hawaiian for messenger from afar. That was, I think, 2017, 2018. And then the second one, by the way, Omamu was the one that actually also had a bit of alien jazz about it because you might remember, maybe you can pull up. There was a. Some beautiful artist impressions of it being cigar shaped. And people were kind of freaking out about that. Like, why the hell does it look that way? Yeah, this guy over here. So the top left, for instance, you can kind of see.

[Joe Rogan]

And this was in 2017. They discovered this.

[David Kipping]

I think it was 2017. I mean, don't quote me exactly on that, but yeah, around 2017, a few years ago. And the, the shape, I mean, that's not a real photo that is inferred. So we can't actually image it that beautifully. We can just see the light bouncing off it and reflecting. And so we can see the light going up and down, up and down. You can kind of figure out what kind of shape it is. So it could either be a pancake, actually, or this. We're not sure which one it is, but either way, it's pretty weird.

[Joe Rogan]

Now, what is the process to discovering something like that? Like, how did they come upon this? What did they use?

[David Kipping]

So the way we look for asteroids and comets in the solar system, it's kind of hard because they move very quickly compared to plants. Right. Plants are just dawdling across the sky. So if you take a, an image, you're going to easily snap it. But these objects, they're moving so fast and they're pretty small. Obviously, this thing is only like a kilometer across or something, you know. Yeah, I mean, compared to Jupiter, that's very, very small, right? So, so it doesn't, there's hardly any light coming off it. If you look into the blackness of space and you've got a kilometer sized rock that's, you know, a couple of AU away from you, that's hardly anything. So these things are, you know, they're hard to detect and so they, they move fast across the sky. And so you have to kind of see these trails. So you see, okay, here's my photo. And you'll notice that there's one dot that's basically going across the sky, okay. And you're like, that's not a planet. Planets don't move that fast. It must be something else. You try and track it and then you can figure out an orbit. And so for these interstellar objects, there's three of them now that have been found. Omamu was the first and there was two I Borisov, which was very comet like. Omamu is a bit weird. It's kind, it looks more like an asteroid than a comet.

[Joe Rogan]

Can you explain the difference?

[David Kipping]

So a comet normally means it's icy. It's like a ball of. Imagine like getting, you know, going skiing, picking up some snow, making a slush ball out of it, chucking in some dirt from the pavement and just mushing it together. That's kind of what a comet is, just, just a dirty snowball. And so when the comets get close to the sun, all that snow boils off and you get these beautiful tails and plumes coming off them. So they're really wonderful to see when you can catch them through a telescope. Whereas a rock doesn't do that. A rock just basically stays a rock. Right? I mean, maybe it will break up, but usually, you know, it stays together. And then the, the third object, three Eye Atlas, is almost certainly comet like as well. So we've had two comets, the last two, two and three are comets. And the first one was a rock. And you know, it was a little bit surprising when we first found them because it was predicted that they should be out there. So these are, these are things which used to be around another star. So another solar system light years away was giving birth to planets. And during that chaotic process of giving birth to planets, there's, there's lots of material kicking around and some of that material can do a close passage of its Jupiter like planets and get kind of ejected out like a particle accelerator, basically just get swung out of the solar system altogether. And so there's presumably Billions of rocks just. Just wandering between the stars. And now and again, they will, by happenstance, happen to come close to our solar system and pass through, which is pretty wild. And when you predict how often that should happen, we didn't think we'd get anything for, like, for 10 years. We were like, maybe once every 10 years we should get one of these things. And so in the last few years, we've had three. That's partly because we've started to get the telescopes that are more sensitive. But even with those more sensitive telescopes, we still didn't expect to get quite as many as we've seen.

[Joe Rogan]

How can you even this. This goes a little beyond my pay grade here. How can you even accurately, or somewhat accurately predict how many you might see when you're talking about small objects, relatively speaking, compared to planets, as you say, that are coming from other solar systems that are light years away from us?

[David Kipping]

It's a lot of guesswork, to be honest. I mean, you. You take a lot of our guessing is based off the solar system when it comes to this. We look at how many rocks we know are kicking around the solar system. You look at the asteroid belt, you look at there's another asteroid belt further out called the Kuiper Belt, that's beyond Pluto. And so you look at, you know, how much stuff do we have in our solar system? And then you sort of simulate the motion of the planets, and you ask, how often would you expect something to get kicked out? So you kind of run this calculation, and yeah, you end up with a number. And the number we're seeing is significantly higher than what we'd expect, which is interesting. But I mean, maybe the solar system is. There's many things about the solar system that are kind of weird, right? We or we know that my main job is looking for exoplanets, planets outside the solar system. And we know for sure the solar system is not a typical solar system. There's many things about it which are odd. Yeah, yeah. So our home, we know, is odd. So why, in the same sense, why should it be that all the junk in our backyard would be typical of junk in other people's backyards, given the solar system has so many weird things about it already? So in that sense, it's not completely crazy. But yeah, there's a few anomalies in particular. Well, about Oumuamua as well, but especially three A atlas that Abby Loeb has been saying on podcast and his blog. He's been saying, like, here's a list of. I think he's got 10 anomalies.

[Joe Rogan]

Now.

[David Kipping]

I was going through it this morning, like looking at all the anomalies he's got.

[Joe Rogan]

See what he's got.

[David Kipping]

Yeah. And so on these 10 anomalies, he's saying, you know, each of these things is sufficiently. Well, maybe not in isolation is strange, but when you take the whole list of them, he thinks there's a case that this could be an alien spacecraft that's passing through the solar system.

[Joe Rogan]

How far away is it? Approximately right now. Where is it at the moment?

[David Kipping]

It's basically behind the sun. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

Okay.

[David Kipping]

Yeah. So it's. That's kind of unfortunate. Yeah, this is. This is one of my colleagues. Debunking of the list, actually, which is kind of fun. So if you.

[Joe Rogan]

Science on science crime.

[David Kipping]

Yeah. So he lists. If you scroll down, he actually lists the. The 10 anomalies here. So if we keep going down a little bit. Yeah, so here's that list. That list there.

[Joe Rogan]

All right, so should I read some of these?

[David Kipping]

Yeah, go ahead.

[Joe Rogan]

All right, let's start with number one. It's retrograde trajectory is aligned to within five degrees with the ecliptic plane of the planets around the sun with a likelihood of 0.2%. Dr. Kipping, let's put that in.

[David Kipping]

Let's. Let's translate that one. Yeah. So all the plants in the solar system basically orbit more or less in a disk in a plane. So it's like a pizza pie.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[David Kipping]

There's not stuff that's completely wonky coming out of the pizza pie. It's all in a flat pizza pie. And so if you have a random asteroid or comet come from outside the solar system, you wouldn't really expect it to happen to come in at the same angle as the plane of the planets themselves. That's called the ecliptic. The ecliptic plane is the plane of the solar system planets. So that's a bit odd because as far as we can tell, each star is just completely randomly oriented in space. There's no particular preference in space. So that's a bit odd. However, I mean, my debunking of this a little bit would be. I'm not sure how much avi's looked at this. I'd like to talk to him about it. But the. These surveys that we're doing to look for comets and asteroids, the survey was called ATLAS. That's why it's objects called 3 ATLAS. So that the telescope survey was called ATLAS. And they preferentially look in that plane because that's where most of the comets in our solar system live, so we tend to give much more attention to that region than we do the north and south poles, if you like, of the solar system. So the fact we detect an interstellar object in that direction is in my book, very plausibly just a product of the fact we look there more often. You know, so there's a selection bias, we'd say like a winner's bias towards looking towards, towards that region. So yeah, for me, and also the likelihood isn't super crazy and it sounds maybe to some people like that's a super low probability. But by scientific standards this, there's millions and millions of, of 1%.1% anomalies. So to me this isn't, you know, if that was the only thing, you definitely wouldn't be like, oh, it has to be aliens. Because.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[David Kipping]

Like of course something could randomly come at that angle. It's not like that has to be an alien spaceship to do that. Natural stuff will also do that sometimes.

[Joe Rogan]

But that's why he's got nine more.

[David Kipping]

That's why he's got nine. So we can keep going. All right, let's go.

[Joe Rogan]

All right, so I'm rooting for the aliens.

[David Kipping]

I'm just saying.

[Joe Rogan]

During July and August 2025, it displayed, displayed a sunward jet anti tail that is not an optical illusion from geometric perspective, unlike familiar comets.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, so I actually did had to do a little bit of research on this one because I have to say, you know, to be clear, comets is not my. Got my notes.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, look at this.

[David Kipping]

I've come with like a two by.

[Joe Rogan]

Four different kind of two.

[David Kipping]

This was all I had in my hotel room. So I was like, this is gonna have to do for the notes today.

[Joe Rogan]

Get this guy a notebook.

[David Kipping]

I know. So yeah, so the thing with this one is there is precedent, so to say to have an. I mean normally comets do have a tail. We all, we all know that if you've ever seen a picture of a comet, you know this beautiful long tails come off it like Halley's comet or something with these beautiful long tails. So this has got a. When we first started taking photos of it, it had a tail going in the opposite direction. Right. So which is kind of weird. And so yeah, that was what Abby's pointing at. So he calls it the anti tail because it's like it's pointing the wrong way. So what this, what, what is this tail maybe is worth sort of highlighting scientifically. So the tail, remember this is a ball of ice. So as the, as the object gets closer and closer towards the sun, it warms up and that caused some of this ice to boil off. And that makes water vapor and carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. All these gases come off and that, that forms what we call a coma. So it's like a little atmosphere around the snowball as it warms up. And then just because the sun itself produces a wind, it's kind of like blasting it. You know, like putting a hairdryer in your long hair, it would blast it backwards. Right. So that's why you get the tail.

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[David Kipping]

So the reason why there's an anti tail is kind of curious, but it's not unprecedented. There are two other objects at least I could find. C 2014 was a comet that has an anti tail and there was another one called Kowutuk that has the 1970s as antelope. So we've seen this before. It's not completely crazy. 7 anti tail and it's possibly a product of the fact that if you're really far away from the sun and actually when we've been taking these images, it is really far from the sun. It's beyond the orbit of Mars when we've been imaging this thing. And normally we don't look at comets until they're really close to the Earth.

[Joe Rogan]

So it's obviously closer to the sun than we are. But.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, yeah, so what? No, no, it's beyond Mars. So when we were first on Mars is the next planet further out in the solar system. So it's a little bit beyond Mars, so further out. And we were imaging it really intensely because everyone was fascinated by this object and we saw it has this kind of anti tail. But we don't normally image comets that far out. It's kind of unusual to take photos of them that far out. It's just because this one's a pop star that everyone's kind of fascinated by it. Kim Kardashian yeah, exactly. So the solar wind at that distance is way less. So it's like putting your hairdryer down from Mode 3 to Mode A half, right? So there's hardly any breeze hitting your face anymore. So the fact is all this stuff evaporates off, but there's not much to push it anymore. And so it's not surprising that on the side facing the sun there'd be more stuff because that's the side that's boiling, right? That's the side that's getting baked by the radiation of the sun. So therefore there would be more stuff there. And that kind of looks like the anti tail. So.

[Joe Rogan]

So it looks like it. It might not necessarily.

[David Kipping]

Well, it kind of is, but it's just. It makes sense because that's the side that you're baking in the sense of course there'd be more stuff on that side than the opposite side. And it's only when you turn the hairdryer up, the solar wind up that you start getting the beautiful tail at the back end. So I think we can explain that. I don't think you need to say. It's also kind of weird to say that's aliens because why would an alien spaceship do that? There's no like. I don't understand why an alien would produce these kind of weird anti tails.

[Joe Rogan]

That's kind of strange, right, because we don't have. You were showing me the imagery of. I forget what it was called. But the first one that they found in 2017, which you said could be like a pancake or a cigar. Or a cigar. But that's a. That's a generated image from what we think it might look like versus what we have actually seen because it was impossible to photograph. So we're dealing with the same problem here to where we're looking at what we think it might look like with three eye atlas versus what it actually.

[David Kipping]

It'S even kind of. Well, we can image this thing but it's hidden because. Yeah. So it has these. The two properties of a comet are that it has a coma which is this atmosphere of crap coming off it and then it has the tail or an anti. Tail in this case. It also has a tail now as well. So it has both of those things. So the actual, I mean what the comet itself, what we call the nucleus, the actual snowball that's buried so deep inside this. These extra layers of. Of stuff coming off it that we can't see it. So we have these nice photos. The Hubble space telescopes looked at it, James Webb Space Telescopes looked at it. There's photo. There's many amateur photos of this object that have been taken.

[Joe Rogan]

Amateur photos as well.

[David Kipping]

Yeah. People, if you have a, you know, 14 inch telescope at home, it's fairly big. But you can buy those online. You could, you could take some really nice images of this thing right now it's well more once it pops out behind the sun a bit easier. So we've imaged it. But yeah, all of these blobs you can see like the. On the top right. For instance on the Wikipedia page there. I think that's. That's taken by professionals. That one I think from ESO European Southern Observatory.

[Joe Rogan]

Is that enough to be able to tell like this is where it's definitely beyond medpeg grade. Like when you just see like kind of the BLOB and you can't get like a full texture to it or anything. Like, can you guys be like, okay, this is how we can identify comet versus rock and etc.

[David Kipping]

Well, if it was a rock, it wouldn't have any that. I mean, you can see the tail is pretty clear and it's, it's just gigantic. It's, it's just this huge cloud of gas that's coming off it. And you can even tell what that gas is made out of. So if you, if you take that light and you pass it, as you know, it's like white light, but you can pass it. White light contains all the colors of the rainbow. So you can pass it through a prism and it splits it up. And then if you look at that light, you'll see there are some colors that are missing. And the colors that are missing are indicative of particular molecules which absorb those colors. So that's how it's called spectroscopy. And that's how we can. Yeah, it's on the Pink Floyd album. So this is how you can figure out what, what stuff it's made out of. So we know that this object is made of water, it's made of carbon dioxide or the gas is coming off it. Water, carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide. And those are like what all comets do. So it, it looks, everything about it looks very, very comet like in that sense. So I would say, yeah, maybe we can move on to other anomalies. But I don't think the, you know, the, this one is particularly slam dunk.

[Joe Rogan]

All right. Number three. Its nucleus is about a million times more. How do you say it again? Oumuamua.

[David Kipping]

Ohmua.

[Joe Rogan]

One Oumuamua. And a thousand times more massive than two I Borisov while moving faster than both altogether with a likelihood of less than 0.1%.

[David Kipping]

Yeah. The challenge here is the mass estimate itself. That's what I've seen in this blog by my great colleague Jason Wright. People should really check out this blog. If you're super interested, just Google Jason Wright. Right. With a W W R I G H T. He's a professor at Penn State and he's been, he's been providing the counterweight to Abby in, in popular discourse on this. So I'm glad to see this have some, some debate on this.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[David Kipping]

And he's, he's pointing out, you know, this calculation is really difficult. Like to weigh a comet is non, non trivial. Right. So the only way normally in astronomy we can weigh how heavy something is is by gravity. That's what gravity Does. Gravity is all about mass. So if you want to measure how heavy is Mars, let's say you use the moons of Mars. The moons of Mars, Phobos and Demos go around and you see how far away are they from Mars and what is their orbital period. We do this calculation in my class for the students for undergrads. So I won't put you through the pain of that.

[Joe Rogan]

I remember that one from physics, actually.

[David Kipping]

Okay.

[Joe Rogan]

Okay, good.

[David Kipping]

So you use Kepler's laws, and when you use Newton's version of Kepler's law of gravity, you can basically figure out the mass. So if there was something in orbit of this comet that you could also monitor, then you could get the mass of it. But without that, it's really difficult. It doesn't. It's not heavy enough to disturb the orbit of the Earth. Right. It's this tiny snowball. It's not going to move the Earth. It doesn't have enough gravity to do that's not going to move the sun. It's not going to move any planet. So it doesn't really have any influence on the solar system gravitationally. So then how are you supposed to get the mass? So the way Abby's been trying to do it is to look at how much mass is it basically losing. So you can see all this gas coming off it, and you can try and figure out how much weight that would have given the amount of light it's absorbing, basically these rainbow effects, these spectroscopy effects. And then from that you can kind of try and back engineer what the mass, therefore, of the object must be. But it's a really tricky calculation. It requires a lot of detailed physics of thinking about the sublimation rate and the carbonyl interchange between these different molecules on the surface. So it's a really challenging calculation. And avi's readers in the back of the envelope thing, so he's probably ballpark, not a million miles away. But it's not how planetary scientists do this calculation. So Abby's not a planetary scientist, he's an astrophysicist, same as me. And so neither of us are really experts on that calculation. And you talk to the planetary scientist people and they're just like rolling their eyes at this calculation. They're saying, that's not the way we do it. It's completely wrong to do that calculation that way. And really they just don't believe this mass. This. They know it's losing mass, but they just don't believe the mass calculation here is correct at all. So I think there's some Debate here about the fact. Right. So the fact. So he's claiming this is a fact. It's a million times more massive than old. And they're saying, hold on, we don't. We don't know that for sure. Like, it's. Maybe it is, but we. We haven't established that. And some people are saying it's way, way less than that.

[Joe Rogan]

It is crazy how the smallest differences, though, in weight and what, you know, the size of something, what that can mean and how it orbits and then how it could affect, like, a planet. Like, when people talk about, like, the end of the Earth, you could have a comet that's, you know, I'm going to make up numbers, but instead of, you know, 1500 light years away, it's 1400 light years away. And that's the difference between we live and we die.

[David Kipping]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

You know, so when you get into these calculations, if he's going outside of his bounds on something like that, I guess that's point three right there. Number. Number three of the list of 10. Like, you know, that can make all the difference in the world. If he's, like, slightly wrong about that, it totally.

[David Kipping]

And the reason why he's, like, pulling on this string, he doesn't explain in that bullet point. But if you do this kind of calculation of, we talked about this calculation, what do you expect to be out there normally? Even. Even if you, you know, scale it up to correct for the fact we've seen more than we have, you'd still expect there to be more small stuff than big stuff. Mm. It's the same reason, like, you know, if you kind of, you know, take a biscuit and you crumple up, there's going to be more tiny crumbs than big chunks left over. And it's the same with rocks smashing into each other in solar system. So there's going to be tons and tons of small stuff, hardly any big stuff. And so Abby's making the point that if this really is that big, it's too big. Like, there's just. Shouldn't. You shouldn't expect to see that every, like, one. Every million years or so, you'd get something that big pass through the solar system. And yet we've caught it within the span of, like, 3 or 4 years of looking for these things. So it would be so freakishly large that it would. It basically means it can't be natural.

[Joe Rogan]

Don't they also have estimates on how old this is or, like, how far it goes back or might think it's.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, kind of by proxy. So yeah, so this object is super old, most likely, but it is a statistical argument. So the fact is the other thing that's weird about this object is moves really fast. So it's way faster near the two. It's moving about 60 kilometers per second when it first entered the solar system, which is way, way faster than any of the planets or stuff we have in typically it's like 20 to 30 kilometers per second. So this is like factor of two or three faster than typical stuff in the solar system. And we think that speed very roughly of these objects should correlate to their age. And the reason being that the older something is, the more time it's had to pass by other stars. So the galaxy's moving, Right. The stars are jumbling around, moving from place to place. And this rock could have encountered not just one star, but two, three or four. Could have had many encounters, maybe not as close as it's had to the sun, but each encounter gives it like a little speed boost, like a gravity assist. Basically. That's what we do for the spacecraft in the solar system. These slingshots around the planets to get more speed. So this thing could have picked up speed through its journey through the galaxy. And you'd think therefore its speed means it's old because it's, it's moving so fast. So it's definitely a hand wavy statistical argument. It's, you can't say, oh, it's exactly 8 billion years old, but it probably is about that old. So that means it's, the solar system is four and a half billion years old. It's older. The galaxy is about 13 billion years old. The whole universe is about 14. So it's, yeah, it's over half the age of the universe in age, most likely.

[Joe Rogan]

How do we know the age of the galaxy approximately?

[David Kipping]

Yeah, that's a great question. We know the age of stars. Age in the galaxy itself is directly is not, not really possible. But you can age all the stars that you have in the galaxy. And then since a galaxy really is just a bucket of stars by proxy, that you can kind of use that to say how old the galaxy itself must be. But it's also a little bit of an ill formed question to even ask how old a galaxy is because it's constantly changing. So our galaxy is not the same galaxy that it was 5 billion years ago or 6 billion years ago. It has been eating other galaxies and it continues to do so. There's two small satellite galaxies around us called the Magellanic Clouds which We're probably going to engulf at some point. There's the Andromeda galaxy, which is the nearest major galaxy, and that's on a collision course with us. So in, I think it's about 5 billion years or so, these two galaxies will hit.

[Joe Rogan]

And what happens when they hit?

[David Kipping]

Yeah, so you might wonder, like our stars can like smash into each other and it's just going to go crazy. But the galaxy is extremely diffuse, so that, you know, the typical distance between stars is just vast. So the probability of any two star stars actually colliding is really small. There's actually a calculation again, that undergraduates often do to sort of convince them of this, because you might think, no, no, surely something that's going to smash. If you have two galaxies come, but they basically just pass through each other, but the gravity tugs them back so they kind of like go through each other and then that each time they oscillate back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and eventually they just kind of become one new galaxy. And we call that Milkdromeda Milky Way Andromeda. So we predict there will be a Milk Dromeda one day.

[Joe Rogan]

That feel like an earthquake here.

[David Kipping]

I don't think we'd even know. I mean, the sky would look spectacular because you'd literally see another freaking galaxy in the sky. Oh, wow. It wouldn't shred it to pieces, but we wouldn't feel anything.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, that's interesting.

[David Kipping]

And we wouldn't be here anyway. I mean, this is 5 billion years in the future, but so on by then. Yeah. I mean, the sun won't last that long, to be honest. But anyone who is around then, it would be pretty awesome to witness. So, yeah, aging galaxies is hard, but we do know that our galaxy is probably very mature. Not too far off. You know, the, the seed of what became the Milky Way, the proto Milky Way, is of order of about the age of the universe almost. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And that because it's interesting that you said, I believe it was like the galaxies Approximately, we estimate 13 billion years old. And then the universe itself is like 14 billion.

[David Kipping]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Which, you know, a billion years is a lot. But when you look at like the percentage, like you're talking about something that's, you know, over 90% the age of the universe itself. That's pretty crazy because we don't even know how many galaxies there are out there.

[David Kipping]

Yeah. I mean, we don't know how big the universe is. Right. The universe could be infinite as far as we can tell. We can, we can see a certain Distance, and we're just not sure. Maybe it just goes on and on forever. So we can count how many we can see in our local volume. It's really limited by the speed of light. Right. So if the universe is 13.8 billion years old, you can only see something in principle that's 13.8 billion light years away. We can actually see a little bit further than that because space itself stretches. So because of that stretching of space, we can actually see out to about 45 billion light years away. But that. That light that we are seeing, this is what the James Webb Space Telescope is all about, is seeing light from literally the very first stars and galaxies that were being born in the universe. And those objects are. You know, it doesn't matter. You could build a telescope that's a million times more powerful or larger than James Webb, and you can't see back past that point because that's limited by the speed of light itself. So it just could go on and on.

[Joe Rogan]

So the James Webb telescope is wild to me. What that can. The fact that human beings invented something like that, that can see. I mean, the images are insane.

[David Kipping]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

That you look at. I mean, as an astronomer. That's when. When they came up with that, you got to be thinking to yourself, holy right?

[David Kipping]

It was such a. It was such a gamble in so many senses as well like that. If it didn't work out, it really could have been very difficult for NASA to recover from it and for astrophysics to recover. The telescope is very complicated. Right. It's. I think it has over 200 parts that have to unfold when it went into orbit, and it's not orbiting the Earth. The Hubble Space Task orbits the Earth. So that's why astronauts have gone up there, I think, four times and fixed the damn thing every time something goes wrong. We can go up there, we can fix it, we can replace apart, we can upgrade it, we can refuel it, do all that stuff. This thing is so far away, it's about four times further away than the Moon is. So it's. No human has ever gone that far in space before. And I think people have concerns about whether, you know, a human could even survive that journey and go out and come back. So there's no intention or plan or even. There's nothing on board the spacecraft itself that even allows a human being to service it. There's no, like, panel you can open for astronauts to handily fix something. It's not designed to do that.

[Joe Rogan]

So just set it and forget it. Basically.

[David Kipping]

Yeah. So you have to make sure you don't screw anything up. Right. Because if, if any one of these 200 moving parts when it unfolds, goes wrong, it's. It's stuck. So, yeah, maybe you could Google like James Webb unfolding or JWST unfolding. Yeah, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

I just look through the imagery it captures sometimes.

[David Kipping]

Yeah. And you can see like it was, it was packed up like in that middle right panel. You can see like it were go down one, the second row and on the right. Yeah. So you kind of see this kind of sequence of images where the way it launched was like, it was on the left there. It was kind of like, like folded right up.

[Joe Rogan]

It came out like tars a little bit.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it was like, it was, it was designed to be like stuffed into the Ares rocket which launched it. But it wants to get into this full unfolded size. So it had to do all these complicated maneuvers. All these actuators had to push it open. And, you know, if in one of those steps went wrong, we just wouldn't have a telescope. And it was 10. It was almost $10 billion. So this is why it's such a big risk for NASA. Right. Because if it took NASA about. NASA's budget is about $25 billion a year in total. I think it's been cut now under the new administration is normally about $25 billion a year. But of course, only a fraction of that goes to building telescopes. Like a tiny fraction. So the budget for telescope building each year is probably a lot of like a couple of hundred million dollars or something. So if you're going to build a $10 billion telescope, that means it's going to take you 20 years of like committing all of your resources to just this one. Yeah. And so astronomers like me and many astronomers were kind of pissed with James Webb. A. We had other ideas. We were like, hey, I want to build this telescope. Well, let's try this thing. And they were like, no, sorry, we've got no money for that. Everything's going to James Webb. And it was like that for like 20 years. So it was kind of annoying. So what if this thing doesn't work out? I mean, it's amazing, but it kind of like tied our hands. It's putting all of your eggs in one basket.

[Joe Rogan]

Right, right.

[David Kipping]

And if that basket breaks, you're. You're in deep shit.

[Joe Rogan]

Now, what were like some other ideas of other types of telescopes you would have wanted to develop that were different than Hubble, obviously, I assume.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, there's lots of ideas of doing smaller telescopes looking in different wavelengths. So when there was a recent call for big ideas for new telescopes and there was three or four ideas that were proposed, one was to actually take photos of planets called the habitual worlds observatory. So that would be fantastic because James Webb, it can take photos of planets, but only really big planets and planets which are basically forming. So when a planet is first forming, it's really bright, it's very hot, it's like a lava world almost. And so there's all this heat coming off it. And so James Webb can detect those. But if it was the Earth around the sun and it's a mature system like we are, it can't see those. That's impossible. So you need, you need one of these more sophisticated telescopes specially designed to do that. So that was one idea. Another one was to look in totally different wavelengths of light, like X rays. So build an X ray super telescope. We've had small X ray telescopes and they've been amazing. But if you build a big X ray telescope, you can see stuff like black hol emerging. You can see the center of galaxies, you can see these active galactic nuclei where all this stuff's flying into black holes. You can see quasars. So X rays let you see like the most extreme stuff happening in the universe, like all like the high energy, extreme need for speed type stuff. That's like, that's what, when the universe is on steroids, that's when you want to go to X rays. You see all this wild stuff.

[Joe Rogan]

Why can that do it versus like the James Webb telescope can't do that kind of thing.

[David Kipping]

It's to do with the wavelength of light that it looks at. So we, we see invisible light. So it goes from about 400 nanometers to about 700, 800 nanometers. That's a very narrow range. If you, if you could see further into the red than we can, then you'd see the infrared. And that's what James Webb looks at. That's a longer wavelength of light. And so Einstein taught us and quantum mechanics shows us that the. But there's a very strong connection between the wavelength of light and the energy of the photon itself. So it's basically proportional. So the longer the wavelength, the less energy that photon is carrying.

[Joe Rogan]

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[David Kipping]

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[David Kipping]

That means that the source that created that photon was a low energy event, right? So it was a warm planet, it was the surface of a star. Comparatively, we could see those kind of low energy environments. Whereas if you go towards the left and you go towards shorter wavelengths, you go towards the ultraviolet. That's what obviously gives you a suntan. If you go even more extreme, you get into X rays that's obviously so energetic, it passes mostly through your body, those rays. And so those photons carry a huge amount of energy. And so the only way to make such an energetic photon is that it has to be like two stars collided or. Yeah, like something's falling into a black.

[Joe Rogan]

Hole or that's what you're saying. When black holes collide, I can see.

[David Kipping]

That, yeah, you get all this wild high energy astrophysics happening. So X rays are a probe to that most extreme end of the universe. So it depends what your interests are. I mean, those folks had a really good case, but obviously they can't do anything to do with planets, nothing to do with light. That's got nothing to do with life or aliens or anything like that. That's just to do with understanding the universe better. Whereas James Webb actually wasn't really interested in planets either. It's its goal. The reason why it went to the infrared is because it wants to look at the very first galaxies forming in the universe. So a galaxy normally produces light in the visible, like we see. That's why we can see stars. But because the universe is stretching and expanding, if an object is really, really far away, billions of billions of light years, that light gets stretched out by the expansion of space itself. And so that light that used to be blue light becomes red light and then infrared light. And so the only telescope that could see the first stars in the universe would necessarily have to be an infrared telescope. So that's why James Webb was built. That was really his goal, was to see the very first stuff happening, what happens.

[Joe Rogan]

I'm a little fixated on the black hole thing because one of the amazing things about the movie Interstellar is that when we later actually got a look at a black. That came out in 2014, when we got to look at a black hole in 2019, five years later, it looked frighteningly similar to what Christopher Nolan had created. Which is just kind of crazy how that worked out. But, like, when you say two black holes are, like, gonna collide together, what. What does that even mean? Like, what does that look like?

[David Kipping]

So there are. All stars evolve as they get older, they change. And the sun will not evolve into a black hole. It's not big enough to fall into a black hole. But the biggest stars will. And a lot of stars are in binary star systems.

[Joe Rogan]

Wait, the sun's not big enough to.

[David Kipping]

Fall into a black hole to become a black hole. It won't fall into itself.

[Joe Rogan]

I was going to say I saw Matthew McConaughey falling.

[David Kipping]

Yeah. So you could push the sun into a black hole, but if you leave the sun alone, it will not become a black hole.

[Joe Rogan]

Sound bigger than the sun.

[David Kipping]

Good impression.

[Joe Rogan]

I worked on that one.

[David Kipping]

Yeah. So we don't think that's going to happen to the sun, but some of the biggest stars. Stars will do that. And lots of the big stars actually live in pairs. They're kind of, you know, Aston's pretty lonely. But a lot of stars are binary or even trinary, so they mess around. They're not monogamous. That's right, exactly. Polyamory stars, they have their swing of parties out there.

[Joe Rogan]

That's right.

[David Kipping]

And as they. As they evolve and get older, they can. These stars eventually slowly kind of spiral in towards each other. And there's various ways that can happen. There's lots of people studying exactly different mechanisms that can happen. But generally there's, you know, we expect this to happen. So as they get closer and closer and closer, these binaries will merge eventually. And when that happens, we get these, like, ripples through space time. So it's. It's not really light. There is. There is some light effect as well. But primarily the main effect you see or hear is a ripple in space time itself. And so that's what these gravitational wave detectors like LIGO have been. Been so successful at. So we've detected something like a few hundred merging black holes by hearing them the merge together. And what's really wild, we Have a new factor.

[Joe Rogan]

Hear it.

[David Kipping]

I mean it is basically a sound wave propagating through space time.

[Joe Rogan]

You just hear like black hole just got sucked up.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, if you, if we. Yeah, I mean it is actually technically possible because shifts space, it bends space. And that's what a sound wave kind of does. It compresses air, so it causes a compression wave. So it possible that you could, if you were near one of these events, you could actually hear it with your own ears, which is really. That's crazy. Even in the vacuum of space. So they say in space you can't hear anything. But if you're near emerging black hole, certain configurations, you would actually be able to hear the frequencies. I think my colleague Jan11 told me that and I was like, that is, that is wild.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh my God.

[David Kipping]

So that's. Yeah, it is literally like hearing the universe, these effects. So it's a completely different way. I mean, for 400 years of astronomy, we've just been using light, X rays, photons, it's all light. Whereas this is like radically different. This is like ripples that you're feeling in space itself. So that's been pretty mind boggling. And what's really crazy is that if we keep doing this, if we build even bigger versions of these detectors, these telescopes, these, I mean, they're kind of like a telescope, these gravitational wave detectors. They can be in principle so sensitive that we could detect every black hole merging in the entire universe. There wouldn't be a single black hole merger that we would not be able.

[Joe Rogan]

To in the whole universe. We don't even know the size in the vis.

[David Kipping]

What I mean is the, the visible, the universe that light has time to reach us. Obviously if light doesn't have, if this, I mean, because gravitational waves also travel at the speed of light, so they travel the same speed the speed of light does. So obviously if it's beyond what we call the particle horizon, it's beyond the observable universe. Obviously nothing can travel faster than speed light. So we're not going to see it or hear it. But anything within the observable universe there could be a black hole merging right at the very boundary. And the. We could in principle build detectors with the next generation of observatories that would be able to catch every single damn one of the things.

[Joe Rogan]

What's the relation of time there though? And here's what I mean by that. You know, a hundred years passes here on Earth, but If something exists 12 million light years away or something is the same. This is getting to kind of Interstellar plot, too, is the same amount of time, one second there. Like, it.

[David Kipping]

If, If, If.

[Joe Rogan]

If we're detecting something with black holes like you were just talking about, that's happening way over here, and it takes 200 years to develop here on Earth, is it really just taking a totally different form of time, longer or shorter, to actually develop out there? And how do we know that?

[David Kipping]

Yeah, I mean, depends where you put your clock. So we've got one clock here on the Earth, but where's this other clock you're putting exactly? Is it because you say, like, put it in the system, but if you put it, the closer and closer you put it to the horizon of the black hole, the slower that clock will tick. And eventually, as it's on the event horizon itself, it will stop ticking. So if you. If you watch someone fall into the black hole, like, say I was falling backwards into black hole, and you're watching from the spaceship above going, have a good time watching Matthew McConaughey fall down, he would actually seem to slow more and more and more as he got closer and closer. And from his perspective, that's not happening in his perspective, he just falls straight through. But from our perspective, watching him fall, he would seem to slow down more and more and more. And he'd also get redder and redder and redder because the wavelengths of light now have to. It's kind of like a gravitational. Well, it is literally a gravitational. Well, it's like a hill. And so the light now has to climb out of that hill. And as it climbs out, the hill is losing potential energy. And so it. It shifts. It's called a gravitational redshift. It shifts from. Let's say it was blue light coming off his helmet. It shifts towards the red by that same effect we talk about with the expanding universe. So he would look redder and redder and redder and fainter and fainter and fainter. And eventually he would almost go invisible, be far redder than our eyes can see, and completely freeze on the surface. So he would never actually witness him past the event horizon until the. Literally the end of the universe itself. He'd be stuck there from our perspective, from our.

[Joe Rogan]

But it's not what happened.

[David Kipping]

But from his. I mean, we don't really know what happens inside the event horizon from his perspective. That's where physics kind of breaks a little bit.

[Joe Rogan]

It's crazy, though, that, like, you're telling me I can't could physically, like, take a clock that's moving, and when I. That clock itself, when I'm getting close to this hole. It slows down to like a stop.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

It sounds like a DMT trip, right? It doesn't even sound real. Like, so the clock knows. Like, oh, he's near a black hole. Stop ticking.

[David Kipping]

Yeah. There are so many questions about. Yeah, I mean, we know, we know pretty well what we'd expect to happen from our perspective. And the, the mystery I always think about is what does. Yeah. Matthew McConaughey Experience? Like, what. What does he see from his perspective? And, you know, if I was given the choice, like, you, you know, let's say you're like, you've lived your life, you're 75, 80 years old, and you're like, okay, we've only got a year or two left to go. I'd be quite tempted to throw myself into a black hole, given the option just to, like, see, because it's like a one way trip. You can never tell anyone what you see. Once you go through that event horizon, there's no way you can ever send information back out. So you're what you know is for you and for you alone. And you would be the only human being, the only individual who would ever actually know what happens inside a black hole.

[Joe Rogan]

Now, what if. What if our bodies here are just containers of the soul, which, you know, some religions posit.

[David Kipping]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And when you die physically, your spirit. Actually, it turns out we figured out after death, death passes through something like a black hole to some other side or some other dimension or something like that. Perhaps you might. And I'm totally, like, riffing right here, but perhaps, maybe you would experience something similar to what the actual, like, oh, I'm 75, I got a year or two left. Let me just send it. And fall into a black hole.

[David Kipping]

I've heard wilder ideas for what happens in the afterlife. I put it that way. Yeah, I mean, it's. They're kind of the, like, there's something about black holes that are like a cheat code to reality itself. This. They are, they. They are a break in the rules of the universe itself where, you know, there's these holes that punch through space and time. And all of our questions about, you know, one of the grand goals of physics is to try to unify quantum physics, which is a theory of the very small, with general relativity, the theory of the very large, and black holes, those two worlds meet, and it's pretty much the only object we know of where both of those physical effects manifest in meaningful ways. So, you know, there's this paradox with black holes. Called the information paradox, which is like what happens to stuff that falls in. Quantum theory says that you can't delete information. So it's sort of paraphrasing it a little bit. But essentially it's like every process is reversible. You could like take an egg and you could, you could smash it into a million pieces and crack it on the table. But in principle we could, if we wanted to, like put everything back together and make the egg again, you could undo it. Every process should be time reversible in quantum physics, but in with a black hole, it's not time reversible. When something falls through that event horizon, like we said, that's it. It can't come back out. So there's a. Another way of saying that is that you've lost information the universe has like erased it's deleted information that the universe once had. Let's say it was a textbook with, you know, your, A biography in it or something. All those words, all that information is gone. And quantum physics just can't handle that. And so a lot of physicists are thinking really hard. This is why it's a paradox. It doesn't make any sense. There must be a way for that information to somehow get back out. And one of the ideas that seems connected is Stephen Hawking had this brilliant inside something called Hawking radiation. We now call it. He didn't call it that. We call it Hawking radiation. You're a bit of a jerk if you call something after yourself, right? I know you gotta wait till you kicking radiation. But yeah, he called it. He got called this afterwards, but he basically showed through, you know, some quantum arguments that you, you should expect black holes to evaporate over time.

[Joe Rogan]

To evaporate?

[David Kipping]

Yeah, they don't last forever either. So the, the kind of, the, the cartoon way to understand this is to imagine that a pair of particles pops up into existence, which happens all the time. Even in this room right now in empty space, there's constant virtual pairs of particles popping up and antimatter and matter pop up and immediately annihilate each other so fast that we don't even really have time to see it. And quantum physics says that happens all the time. It's in and it's very well understood and observable. So this should happen on the event horizon of a black hole. So you've got this boundary. Everything on this side falls in. Everything on the other side can escape, in principle. And a pair of particles could form right in that threshold. One of the guys falls in and the other guy has the opportunity to potentially escape. And if it escapes, it is basically removing energy from the black hole because that was that energy, that pair of particles was like, it was like a loan. It's like borrowing money from the bank. And so somehow now that that dollar that you loaned has escaped. Yeah. So the black hole has to lose that dollar, has to decrease in its mass to accommodate for that. So this Hawking radiation effect causes black holes just very, very, very, very slowly lose mass and evaporate. Which is interesting then from the perspective of what happens if you fell in, if time really does get massively distorted, you could in principle observe this speed up effect of seeing your own black hole that you're inside evaporate whilst you're in it and disappear.

[Joe Rogan]

Is there also a. Maybe I'm totally misinterpreting this with the example you just gave, but is there also like a Schrodinger's cat type idea there where there's two possibilities of what happens to the same person? Meaning they fall in or they, they escape?

[David Kipping]

Well, not exactly in this analogy, but you could imagine experiments like that. You could certainly imagine having some. You'd have to have some kind of random 50, 50 quantum coin that's like, okay, 50 of the time this rocket's going to blast you into the black hole. And 50 of the time you're going to stay inside this, inside the ship. And then. Yeah, then you could have these quantum superpositions set up where you're both inside the black hole. And I've never. That's a really wild idea actually. I've never heard of the Schrodinger cat thought of with black holes. But I could imagine having some fun thinking about the consequences of that.

[Joe Rogan]

I don't know, I'm bringing the loot back to like when I was talking with Michio Kaku a couple years ago. Yeah, he would, he was blowing my mind with dimensions. And I'm wondering if there's like some sort of relation there because he's like, we could sit in this room and turn the transistor this way and a dinosaur is there. Or we could turn it this way and it's you and me. And I'm like, like. So that means there's like trillions, gazillions, billions of possibilities that happen. So maybe if you look at a black hole, you would also have those, all those possibilities with the same person. And now it gets into like. What is that? Are black holes the key to time travel? It gets really weird. It gets way beyond me Yeah, I.

[David Kipping]

Mean, the, there's a lot of disagreement about how to even interpret what quantum mechanics is really telling us with these kind of experiments like Schrodinger's cat. So it's a recap. Trading as Cat is that you have a cat in a box and it's a closed box that no one can see inside of, and there's some like poison or something inside. And there's a random particle that's going to decay and there's a 50, 50 chance it will decay in, let's say, the next hour. And if it decays, it will trigger this poison to release and kill the cat. And if it doesn't decay, the cat's alive. So in quantum mechanics, we would say that particle that causes the decay until we observe it, it truly isn't a superposition of both decayed and not decayed. And you can't, it doesn't collapse into one particular case until you actually, you know, start observing it. And so therefore, by extension, shouldn't the cat also be both dead and alive? And so that's really mind boggling to think about. And then you might say what happens when someone opens the box and now he, you know, the, the lab guy can see it and he's like, okay, the cat's alive. But then you could also say, well, the room that he's in, there's now two versions of that room. One where he opened it and saw the cat and one where he didn't. And so then this kind of like bubble of reality kind of expands across the universe. And so, you know, causally, it just goes out and out and out. And so there is a view that the entire. Sean Carroll often holds this view. The whole universe itself is in a giant superposition of all of these different states. And this kind of lends itself a little bit towards a view called the multi, multi world multiverse. This Everettian view. There was a physicist called Hugh Everett that put this worldview for the Many Worlds hypothesis. And it's kind of like Sliding Doors, that movie where like if you miss the train and don't miss train, both of those things actually do happen. And all of these realities are playing out side by side. So there's a, essentially, you know, almost an infinite number of you and me having this conversation in just kind of different quantum realities that we can't interfere with in any way.

[Joe Rogan]

Just one, in one three hour conversation, think about all the possibilities of like the first sentence, you say this word instead of that word and then in the next iteration it's like, well, the.

[David Kipping]

Second sentence is not.

[Joe Rogan]

You know, there's just the number beyond.

[David Kipping]

The scope, just rapidly balloons. So the weirdest thing I've ever heard about this. It kind of creates a philosophical problem called the quantum suicide experiment.

[Joe Rogan]

Quantum suicide experiment.

[David Kipping]

Maybe a better name for it is quantum immortality. I think some simple suicide. That's good. Yeah, suicide. Sometimes people get a bit upset about it. But the idea is, imagine you took like a revolver and, you know, you're definitely pretty pathological to this. I do not recommend anyone try this experiment.

[Joe Rogan]

Don't do this at home.

[David Kipping]

There's a good chance this, this is wrong, this. But if you follow the quantum physics forward and you believe in this Everettian view of the universe, if you tried to shoot yourself with a gun in the head, then there is a chance that that gun will not, not, you know, malfunction or something, something will go wrong with that.

[Joe Rogan]

Do not try this at home.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, do not try that at home. Or stand in front of, you know, stand the road and a truck's about to hit you or something. There's a small chance that truck will get a pop tire and miss you. You know, like in kind of final destination type universes, right? There's like all these, like, weird things that can happen where you actually miraculously survive this, this situation. So there's millions and millions of views and 99.9% of them, them get killed in this experiment. But there's a tiny, tiny fraction of them that miraculously survive. And the idea is like, what is conscious experience? Conscious experience is a continuous flow of, of, of reality from moment to moment. And so you can't, you can't, you can never observe being dead. You can't be one of those dead things because there's nothing to observe. And quantum observation is all about someone there to observe it. So you can only observe yourself as one of these live individuals. So the idea is that you could, you know, take this revolver and do this like three or four times in a row and you would survive. And you would. If you did that, you could prove to yourself that this theory was correct because the probability was so tiny, it would just be miraculous. But in the vast major. The reason why we don't know of anyone who's ever done this is because the vast majority of these universes, you would die, right? So if, you know, if your friend said, I'm going to try this experiment, he's just going to kill himself. That's what's in our reality. But in his, maybe in his conscious version of reality, he wouldn't see that, and he would continue to experience life. So. Oh, he just keeps going. And then you can apply this also to aging. So, I mean, if you die by, you know, getting cancer or you just die because your heart stops when you get old or something again, there's a small chance that heart keeps beating another beat. And so you have this quantum immortality possibility where it's impossible for you to die die, but you can get sick and you can get injured, and so you can become this really decrepit, bedridden, tortured experience where.

[Joe Rogan]

And it is impossible to die.

[David Kipping]

You can't die in this quantum.

[Joe Rogan]

So if I blew my brains out, I still would live.

[David Kipping]

The gun wouldn't go off. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh.

[David Kipping]

Oh, it just wouldn't even go off.

[Joe Rogan]

Or.

[David Kipping]

Or you would, you know, or you would, like, blast a piece of your skull off, but somehow you'd still be conscious or survive the experiment.

[Joe Rogan]

If I got to run off a cliff, I just float boat.

[David Kipping]

Well, you'd slip before you got there or something, you know, like, something would always stop you from. From doing these things. Yeah. Or like a, you know, I don't know, like an eagle would nudge you, like, every time something weird would happen. It seems incredibly unlikely, but, you know, like, in Deadpool is that character Lucky who just keeps, like.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[David Kipping]

Getting away with all these crazy things. So the quantum immortality, it was come up by Max Tedmart, and a lot of people say, like, this is so crazy. It kind of proves. It's so ridiculous. It kind of proves quant. There must be something wrong with this view of quantum mechanics. It can't be right, because it just seems stupid that everyone could, like, keep surviving forever. But the Everettian view is actually the most popular view, I'd say, or one of the most popular interpretations of quantum mechanics there is, because when did he.

[Joe Rogan]

Come up with it?

[David Kipping]

I think it was, like, the 1950s or 60s. So he actually believed. Yeah. Rumors ever. Everett believed he would never die. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Like, die according to our laws of.

[David Kipping]

Dying, or in his reality, he would never die. So obviously we would observe him die because we live in a different dimension, in a sense, to him. But in his dimension, he would continue to live forever. But it's not. It's not a pleasant thing, right, to be. You might. It sounds great at first, but it's like a deal with the devil, because then, like, you don't really want to live. Live forever. Decrepit and unable to do anything.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. That's a strange thing. Thinking about life, I was talking about, like, the concept of heaven with someone the other day and why I actually think, oh, something like reincarnation could really make sense. Because it sounds awesome to go somewhere in the sky for all of eternity after a quick trip here, you know, you do a good job and then you get there and you can fucking eat chocolate and never get fat. You run a 40 40, no problem. You're all around people you love. You drink, you get drunk and you're never hungry. Hungover. Like it sounds amazing.

[David Kipping]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

But it's all good.

[David Kipping]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And then you don't have. There's no like, maybe you're just totally enlightened at that point. But there's no like struggle. There's nothing to make the good stand out from the bad. So the idea of doing that infinitely is crazy. Similarly, the concept of like living life and knowing I'm never gonna die would take away the whole kind of meaning and purpose of like the clock of life here and what you're supposed to try to accomplish while you have whatever time you have. So in some ways it goes against our, you know, little pea brained ideas in humanity, in humanity to even understand or be able to appreciate something like that. Like not dying because it, it takes away from. From the whole meaning of us living in the first place.

[David Kipping]

Yeah. I mean, I'm a huge Tolkien nerd, so. J.R. tolkien, who wrote Lord of the Rings. And you know, the elves don't die in that world. Right. They just live forever. And it's pretty. Yeah, it's pretty strange to like compare the, the way the characters behave in, in those stories. The, the elves are just sad like all the time because they, they just want the world to be the same and they hate things changing. Like when the seasons come and the world, you know, the evolution of the mountains and see rivers change, humans emerge, all this kind of. They hate all that. They just want things to be this, like, just keep it the way I'm used to it. And eventually becomes like a really kind of. Of tragic existence to have this prolonged life. And eventually, yeah, they do kind of go to like a heaven essentially in the story, which is valor. But the human, the humans have much more impetus about them. They're like, hey, I've only got 100 years. I need to get this going. Like, I'm not just gonna sit around messing around. I do wonder though, because, you know, there's people like. What's his name? Brian Johnson. Thank you. Who's trying to extend his life significantly.

[Joe Rogan]

You see him take a mushroom trip the other day.

[David Kipping]

Really?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. He's trying to live a little bit.

[David Kipping]

Okay, I'm glad. Pushing the boat out a little. So yeah, that's good for him. I do think it's interesting, like what would happen if we lived maybe not forever, but 500 years? How would human perspective change about things like climate change? You know, a lot of folks are like, I don't give a shit about climate change because it's not going to happen for another like 200 years before the world screwed over. So why should I give a shit about it? If we live for 500 years, that's now like poisoning your back garden in your, your, you know, in your relatively short term time scale. Right. It's like, why would you invest in your retirement fund? It's because, yeah, it's, sure it's a few decades away, but you know, you're going to live it, you're going to experience being retired one day. So you want to put some money in your 401k because that's gonna happen. So in the same sense, like if you live for 500 years, I wonder if as a society we might mature a lot and think, you know, I think we're so short term focused as a society that's a longer term view might actually be really beneficial.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, but you're also talking about like a middle ground there too. It's not like we're gonna be immortal for, you know, a million years or something, but, oh, if you lived 500 years, you'd think a little bit more about the timeline in front of you. And I agree because it's like, especially in America, we think about tomorrow or like today, you look at other cultures around the world, some of them, you know, they think 300 years out or something like that. Obviously it's more rare these days. But it's like, like when you're talking about something with the climate and like the health of the planet just in general and like our place in, in this universe, like that is a human issue. It's everyone around should care. But then you have all these borders and stories basically of countries that are all different and have different opinions and different cultures and different people. So you can't get everyone to agree on something. It's like, do you think we can have something? Maybe it's not that, but is there even a, would it take something like people knowing that, that aliens exist or something for human beings to suddenly have a moment where we come together and go, oh, wow, we should all care.

[David Kipping]

About that because that affects all of.

[Joe Rogan]

Us equally, you know?

[David Kipping]

Yeah, yeah, I was talking about this when I was on Joe's podcast as well because there's like a double edged nature to humanity, right. That we're, we're competitive and tribal with each other. And that's to a fault in a way.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[David Kipping]

Because sometimes being so tribal and, and wanting the other team to lose is not net good for humanity. Right. Wanting to destroy your enemy, especially if it's like in, you know, sports or something, we often get like so worked up about wanting to crush the, crush your opponent. But, and that's very human that we feel that way. But if we act that way in society, you're just making other people's experience worse and those people could go on to do great things. So it's, it's net bad for humanity, I would say. But, but being competitive also drives us to be better. Right. So if you're, if you're competing in the Olympics against some, some super fast swimmer, you're going to train extra hard to try and get to the top of your game. So yeah, I do kind of wonder with alien civilizations if they're not, if they don't have that tribalism that we have, that competitive. Maybe they never become technological because they're just not driven to sort of, that the peaks of, of of what's possible. And if they are competitive and tribal, maybe their fate is to ultimately destroy themselves. Because that seems like a distinct possibility, at least for humanity, that we could end up in some kind of giant World War III or something one day. Yeah. So it might be like a double edged sword that the only way to become advanced is the same way which ultimately limits your lifetime.

[Joe Rogan]

All right, real quick, I gotta go to the bathroom. We're gonna come back to number four and start going through the three eye Atlas. I didn't forget people. We'll be right back. All right, we're back. So we've been, I like the side tangents off this list because obviously we're explaining three I ATLAS and everything. But I got a lot of questions about the universe, like all of you out there, I'm sure. But we left off at number four right here. We just done number three going through a couple of the other ones that have been observed. But number four on the 10 anomalies that Avi Loeb had is that the arrival of 3i Atlas was fine tuned to bring it within tens of millions of kilometers from Mars, Venus and Jupiter and be observable from Earth at a perihelion with a likelihood of.005%. So let's go to those hotel notes right there.

[David Kipping]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

What do we got going on?

[David Kipping]

Yeah, so this one actually is really easy to debunk because one of my strengths is statistics. I love statistics. I teach that at Columbia. And this is a statistical argument. So we can get into that. Yeah. So the. The comet is making a pretty close approach to these three planets, Mars, Venus and Jupiter. But those are not the only planets in the solar system. So if you do it. If you do the calculation differently, and you said, okay, what about how close it's getting to Mercury, the Earth and Saturn? Instead you get basically 50% probability. Times by 50 times by 50%. So you get 1 in 8. So it just becomes like a, you know, not a big deal at all. This is, this is the situation. So it really is subject to which planets you pick. So let me give you an example. You could, you could apply this to human beings. Okay, so what is the probability I'm an alien? Right? So you could look at weird things I'm doing and say, that's a bit anomalous. David does this weird thing. That's a bit anomalous. So I'm gonna show off a little bit. But what. My best lift. So I figure I see the day. My best lift at the moment is two plates for about five reps and apparently pretty good.

[Joe Rogan]

All right.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, there you go. Apparently only about half a percent of the world's population can do that.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[David Kipping]

Okay, so maybe I'm a super strong alien that's just like hiding in human skin.

[Joe Rogan]

You're in the wrong room.

[David Kipping]

Right? So I know this. You're probably even more extreme, you guys.

[Joe Rogan]

But like, Men in Black guy coming.

[David Kipping]

Could happen. You never know. And then let's. So there's a. Let's say there's a half a percent probability then that I'm alien by that definition. And now what is it? I also have a weird accent, right? I talk with a British accent. Only about 1% of human beings speak with a British accent.

[Joe Rogan]

Makes you sound smarter.

[David Kipping]

Yeah. So maybe, maybe I'm an alien who, like, couldn't figure out how to talk proper American. And, like, this is like the best I can do to, like, pull it up.

[Joe Rogan]

Do you have an American accent?

[David Kipping]

No. No.

[Joe Rogan]

You can't do it.

[David Kipping]

I can't do it.

[Joe Rogan]

I have a shitty British accent.

[David Kipping]

So there we go. I'm not going to. I'm not going to do accents. But if you multiply those two probabilities together, 1% being British times by half percent of being able to lift two plates then you'd get the same probability, hit 0.005% percent. So wow. It's just all you do is just take a couple of things about yourself like your blood type and like maybe some genetic condition you have or some, you know, some ailment that you have, multiply those two qualities together and you can like trivially get down to this percentage. So if you, if you take the object and just look at its history and say there must be something about it that's a little bit odd. It's really easy to back engineer like these crazy low probabilities. And again like if you just take three of the planets, you could, you could get, you'll get a much more mundane number than this. So this is just what we would call P hacking in statistics. P hacking. So this is a P value. Technically it's not actually a likelihood value in statistics, which this is a P value. P value is when you ask like how surprising something is. So it's a measure of surprisingness. And if you, if you like a very, if you like engineer these numbers very carefully. It's called hacking. P hacking. And it's, it's banned in most journals in science to do this. You're not allowed to do it because it's been shown over and over again, especially in nutrition and health.

[Joe Rogan]

Health.

[David Kipping]

There are so many studies that do P hacking to say like, hey, if you eat three tomatoes a day, you know, you'll, you'll get, you know, get rid of all your cholesterol or something.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh yeah. Jesus Christ.

[David Kipping]

And there's tons of P hacking going on in those studies. So this is like not, it's just not legitimately even allowed in, in most scientific journals anymore. So I, I think this one's pretty easy to kick out.

[Joe Rogan]

I see stuff every day where it's like new study says and it's like ridiculous thing and ridiculous thing. It's like, oh, I guess everyone should just do that now and you're healed. It's crazy. But if that number, so it's 0.005. If that number had said 0.000000005, you might be like, okay.

[David Kipping]

It depends on how you do it. Because I could just keep adding things onto the, you know, look at lift 225 British blood type. I don't know the fact that I'm right footed. You just keep adding like more and more stuff. My, my eye prescriptions 3.25. So you just keep adding stuff on, right. And you would end up with ridiculous Probabilities, it just, it just depends on how, how much you engineer it. So a P value alone isn't meaningful. If you really want it to do something surprising, it's got to do something unnatural. It's not unnatural for an object to pass near to a planet. That's not unnatural. If it came to a full stop, if it just went and just stopped in space, went backwards, that's not natural. Then we'd be like, hold on. That is freaking weird. That's not. There has to be a ship. I would agree with Abby though. That has to be a ship. It is not doing any of that, of that stuff. Everything is doing is what asteroids and comets do.

[Joe Rogan]

Okay. Number five, its gas plume contains much more nickel than iron as found in industrial produced nickel alloys. And a nickel to cyanide ratio that is orders of magnitude larger than that of all known comets, including 2i Borisov with a likelihood below 1%. All right, let's take that out of Japanese.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, so it's, it's. When you do this spectroscopy of these objects, we talked about the different molecules you can detect coming off it. So we know there's water coming off it, which is obviously very typical of a comet. There's also tons of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. Again, totally normal for a comet to do that kind of stuff. And another kind of trace, you know, there's trace metals which come off as well. So there's iron and nickel and other things. And the ratio of nickel to iron is, is super high. So that's kind of odd. It's producing tons of nickel and hardly any iron at all. So that was the anomaly that Abby's talking about. And that is genuinely quite weird. We haven't really seen any comet. There's no known comet asteroid, which produces this extreme ratio that's been observed for this object. However, we did again, we observed it at kind of a weird time. It's pretty rare that we observe comets this far out in the solar system. It's just because this is like the celebrity object. We've been giving it so much attention. So it's possible there's actually a ton of objects. We've just not been doing this for that. It does this. The other interesting thing is if you look at the papers of these detections, they've been monitoring it all the way from an au. By the way, a DIS is a unit of distance. That's the distance from the Earth to the Sun. 1 au. We've been monitoring this comet from about 3 au into about 2 au. And measuring how much Nicolet's got all the way along that journey. And what we're seeing is that it started out really extremely, and it's getting more and more normal as it gets closer and closer in. And the prediction is actually as it gets closer to the sun, it will be indistinguishable from other comets, the ratio. So again, this kind of speaks to the fact we caught this guy so early that it looks weird to us. But that's maybe just because we don't normally observe things at this part of the journey. And as it's got closer and closer to the sun, it actually looks indistinguishable in terms of its nickel emission. So it's pretty. Yeah, it's pretty hard to like, really know how anomalous this truly is, because it's, it's the very nature of our observations on it are kind of anomalous. How much attention it's got is anomalous. So the deeper you dig, you get all this extreme, finely grained detail. But it's not obvious whether these things are true for other comets or not. And the other thing is this is obviously the third interstellar object. So there's only three. There's only in two other objects to compare to, if you're being really honest about it. So to say, yeah, it's got an extreme nickel compared to solar system objects, but it's not a solar system object. So why are we even, like, really comparing to that anyway? We know that that exoplanets are freaking weird compared to the Earth's, the solar system planet. So why would we expect comets from other star systems to look the same as comets we have here is no reason why that should be so.

[Joe Rogan]

By the way, you had said this earlier, but it was just coming up in the context of what you were explaining there. When you talk about 3i Atlas entering our solar system. So it's within the same galaxy, but it's coming from a different solar system, which is effectively coming. Coming from a different star system. So something. Another equivalent of the sun somewhere else. How does that happen? Does it just float in? Or is there something that needs to happen for it to be able to leave another solar system and come to ours? I'm thinking like, you know, are there gravitational pools working against it? What's the science there?

[David Kipping]

Yeah, I mean, we know there are ways of ejecting stuff out of the solar system. Even the solar system most likely probably had a fifth gas giant when it was really young. So there's Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, or Uranus, Neptune, really, in that order. But there was probably another ice giant, so another Neptune, Uranus type object in the solar system. And the reason why we think that is because if you simulate the planets and let them orbit around super fast, you speed up the simulation. Very often, Neptune gets kicked out the solar system altogether through gravitational interactions with Saturn and Jupiter especially. So the way to solve that problem, because obviously Neptune's here, is to add another gas giant and then that guy gets kicked out, and that saves Neptune and Uranus. So we think even in the solar system, we probably ejected not just tiny rocks, but entire planets at the freaking solar system. So there are literally rogue worlds drifting between the stars, which might even have moons. And even maybe there's life on those things. It's pretty wild to think about out. So there's definitely ways that can happen. Another good example is Triton around Neptune. So Triton is a moon which goes backwards around Neptune, which is kind of weird.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Why does it go backwards?

[David Kipping]

Well, for a long time people were like, that doesn't make any sense. Like if it's forming, should form as the planet forms, it should spin in the same way the planet spins. None of this makes any sense. But then this brilliant astrophysicist Craig Agnell came up with a mechanism to explain this. And you basically have two, like a binary object. So you have Triton and it has another body next to it. And these two objects just orbit around each other like a binary. And we know of loads of binaries like this in the asteroid belt. So there's this binary of that swings closer and closer towards Neptune. And then what's happening is at the moment of close approach, Triton is on the inside and it's moving at almost the same speed as Neptune. So they're kind of like, it's like two cars down the highway that are moving at 70 miles an hour, 71 miles an hour. You can kind of look through each other's windows and see each other. And it looks kind of slow. And so that means that Neptune can gravitationally capture the moon and grab onto it, whereas the other object is going the other direction. So that's like the car going the opposite highway direction, that's going 70 miles an hour in the other direction. So that's like 140. So that thing just gets slingshot super fast and gets kicked out of the solar system altogether. So this mechanism, we think, explains how you can form some of the moons, including Triton. So there are probably these binaries which also kick. So maybe three Atlas, maybe Omu Mua used to be in a pair and they got too close to another planet and one of them became a moon and the other guy, they split, checked out. Yeah, that's, that's a pretty easy way of making these. Yeah, right. We don't know for sure, but that's one easy way of doing it.

[Joe Rogan]

When you talk about, I believe you said it was Neptune, when we run these simulations, could be kicked out of the solar system. How long? Like, let's say we notice one day, oh, they're getting kicked out, out. And you can see it's like pointing o return. How long does that simulation take for it to actually leave the solar system? Are we talking days, years? Hundreds of years?

[David Kipping]

Millions and millions.

[Joe Rogan]

Millions of years.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, to, to these speeds are very slow. So I mean, it's going a similar speed to Voyager 1, Voyager 2, and it would take Voyager 1, Voyager 2, I think, something like a hundred thousand years or so to reach like the nearest star. So that, yeah, these are very slow speeds, but the galaxy is very old, so there's like plenty of time, time for these things to make their way.

[Joe Rogan]

And then within another thing I was just thinking about within our solar system, obviously, like, you know, there's planets that we're trying to figure out if at some point we could reach, but they're so far away, you know, are there definitive cases to be able to say that? Not necessarily aliens or something like that, but there's some life on Jupiter, for example. Can and, and how do we know that?

[David Kipping]

It depends what you mean by on Jupiter, because Jupiter doesn't have a surface. So what's the on mean? It would probably have to be like, hanging out in the clouds, just like floating around. And people have speculated about that. Scientists have speculated about that. I think Carl Sagan actually thought about that quite a bit and was wondering there could be life in the clouds. It's been suggested for Venus. That's true. So a few years back, there was a detection of a molecule called phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus. And on Earth, phosphine is pretty much only made through life. Life, you know, through these. Happens on, like bays and shorelines. There's this bacteria. It's. I think it gives that truffle smell. Actually. No, that's dms. It's like. Yeah, so anyway, it's a molecule which is made by bacteria and it was found in the atmosphere of Venus. And it turns out even though Venus is like a hell hole, the surface is like 700800 kelvin. So extremely hot. It's like an oven on the surface. So there's definitely no way you'd expect life to be on the surface. But as you go up and up and up, up, there is a certain layer where the pressure is similar to this room and the temperature is similar to this room. So it's possible there could be bacteria which are just wafting along in the clouds. It's a little bit challenging how they stay up there. Like you need, you know, do they, do they propel themselves somehow or is there wafts that just sort of keep them afloat for their entire life cycle? I mean it's a little bit speculative but in principle the conditions are right and phosphine was detected so people got excited about that. That, so I think people are, you know, scientists are open minded about that possibility. It's not, it wouldn't be your first bet though. Right. Because there's moons like Europa and Enceladus which have like liquid water underneath their surface and plumes and organic molecules. Yeah. So we know obviously on the Earth oceans are full of life. So if you've got a giant ocean underneath these moons, it seems like that would be a more obvious place to find life since we know for sure that's a place where life can survive rather than saying, hey, the first place we should look is the clouds of Neptune. Because you require like two or three miracles for that to work out. Whereas you only require the same thing to have happened on Earth to have happened in these moons. So I think when we sometimes the public get frustrated with scientists saying why do you guys only care about Earth like planets? And it's not that we're narrow minded. We don't think about life in strange places like on the surface of neutron stars. Even people have speculated even the galaxy could be a living being. People scientists have speculated about that the entire galaxy could be an organism. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

That is the last scene in Men in Black.

[David Kipping]

Right, right. Yeah. So scientists have very wild imaginations, trust me, about what is possible. That's good, but it just wouldn't be if you're going to prioritize, hey, here's you know, $10 billion NASA's got to, to look for life. You, you have to, you know, it's like stocks and bonds. Like okay, maybe you put like 1% into your Bitcoin or something. I don't know what your it's like but you're probably going to like put, put some of the money in the high risk stuff, but not all of it. And then Most of your money, probably lower risk investments. It'd be kind of radical to stick all in the highest risk thing possible.

[Joe Rogan]

You're trying to stick it to what you could relate to. A human being, like you said, couldn't live in a cloud like atmosphere. They got to live on something that has somewhat similar resources in a way. So that's where you're going to look. It makes sense.

[David Kipping]

Yeah. And it's similar for stars, it's similar for planets.

[Joe Rogan]

It.

[David Kipping]

So yeah, we gotta, we gotta look at least, you know, the chances are good to look at places where we know for sure life was successful.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, I don't hear nearly as much talk from like Elon and other people these days about the whole colonization of Mars. For years that was like the thing he would lead with. Always talk about it. Where are we with that? How realistic is that over the next 300 years?

[David Kipping]

I mean, dude's got a trillion dollars now.

[Joe Rogan]

That's what I'm saying. It's like you're telling me about the telescope costing like 10 billion or something. I'm like, buddy, buddy, come on.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, he could easily do that now, right? He's got enough money to do that. I mean, there's a technological challenge which obviously he's trying to solve with Starship. Starship is had like a bunch of launches. I'm not sure how many they're at now. Maybe like half a dozen. A dozen or so each one. They seem to be making progress, but it's been a difficult nut to crack. I think for SpaceX is to get that to be a fully reusable vehicle as they imagine it to be. And even if they get that, obviously to go to Mars. Mars requires all these extra steps like refueling in space.

[Joe Rogan]

How would that work?

[David Kipping]

So I think the plan is to have like a tanker version of starship that just launches and it's just full of fuel. That thing orbits around the Earth and then you have another starship comes up, which is like the crude version, and then they dock in space and it dumps all over the fuel to the other guy. And then once it's in space, once it's in orbit of the Earth, it's a little bit less energy now to get to Mars, so it's, it's easier to go. So you can't do it in one shot. I think is true. Like starship with a crew and all the infrastructure it needs, it can't do it in one shot. You have to have a refueling. So that's, I don't think there's Any, you know, plans for starship to test that in the near future, as far as I'm aware. So there's still like a lot of stuff they have to prove. But I mean, I'm in favor of it. I think it'd be great. I really would love to see humans work on Mars in my lifetime, but I. Right. I don't want to do it, but I think I'd love to see somebody.

[Joe Rogan]

Nice to die on Mars. Right. You go there, that's. This is where it ends.

[David Kipping]

I know. It's like, would you want to die in Antarctica? Because Antarctica is a lot nicer than Mars.

[Joe Rogan]

How so?

[David Kipping]

Well, Antarctica is about, I mean, it's about roughly the same temperature as Mars. It's not different in temperature, but it has atmosphere. There's no, there's hardly any atmosphere on Mars. It's very, very small atmosphere. So, you know, if you took your helmet off, you, you, you definitely suffocate pretty quickly. There's no oxygen to breathe. And then on top of that, there's water. There's tons and tons of water in Antarctica. You just melt the ice and you got water. There's hardly any water on Mars. It's really difficult to come by. There's a little bit in the polar caps, but it's, it's a much more challenging place to survive than Antarctica. So I think that's a good point of comparison. And humans do live in Antarctica, but not, not all year round. It's like they'll stay there for like six months. It's like astronauts on the International Space Station, like, yeah, you'll do a stint.

[Joe Rogan]

But yeah, don't sign me up.

[David Kipping]

No one wants to live their life in Antarctica. What kind of life is that?

[Joe Rogan]

So unless they have pyramids underground, I've heard, you know.

[David Kipping]

Oh yeah, well, maybe there's pyramids on Mars. Who knows? We would be cool to dig up Mars and see what's going under the surface.

[Joe Rogan]

That's a good idea.

[David Kipping]

Space 2000, 2001 Space Odyssey that's, that's in the moon they find the monuments, right? So there could be. There could be. I mean, I'm actually a big proponent of that. I think one of the. I'd like us to do that. I think we should build structures underneath the surface of Mars and the moon for future aliens to find.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, a little reverse, reverse engineering here.

[David Kipping]

Yeah. My, used to, my pitch is that this is the most likely way that we'll have communication with another civilization, a non human civilization.

[Joe Rogan]

But the pitch is that it'll be after we're gone and dead.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, yeah. So it's, it's not two way communication. It's one way. It's the same way that, yeah, the pyramids are a form of communication, right? There's hidden graphics written on the surface and you can decode it. And they are, they're a monument to their brilliance, right, to these pharaohs. And so it is a message which has been sent through time and we can't reply to that message, but we can learn a lot from that message. So if we're going to have two way communication with aliens, it requires them to be contemporaneous with us, right? They have to be A, nearby because of the finite speed of light, and B, they have to also happen to have emerged about the same time that we emerged and not be so far behind us that they can't use radio, but not so far ahead of us that don't give a shit about us. So they have. There's a lot of like, coincidences you require to have two way communication. So maybe that'll work out. I'd prefer that. But it might be that one day we come to the realization that's just not going to happen. Like we've surveyed the nearby planets, there's no one there. The only option we have is to leave a message, to leave a time capsule for someone to discover one day.

[Joe Rogan]

Couldn't that be destroyable though too? Like we always look at New York and this could all be just completely gone and no recollection that any of this existed, Right? So if you're building some, whether it's a pyramid, whatever it may be, some sort of monument. And your idea is, I think you said to build it underground or something like that, what's to stop, you know, a core event in the event that the planet explodes from destroying all that on the way to rebuilding itself as a new planet.

[David Kipping]

No, you're exactly right. And that's why I said Mars and the Moon especially and not the Earth. The Earth is a terrible place to do this. This is one of the advantages of going to these other planets. The Earth has weathering, right? So, yeah, if you calculate how long New York City would last for if we went away, it's a void of a few million years and then there'd be a trace of it left at that point. And you see that with like Chinese Chernobyl, right? There's, you know, if you look at Chernobyl after that nuclear accident, there's already, nature is like taking over. Maybe you can grab some Photos of that to. To show it. But you can see all these, like, trees and wildlife just kind of encroaching back onto that city. So, yeah, I don't think there'd be any trace of humanity. Whatever we try to do after, say, 100 million years.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, it's. It's like I am legend, basically.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, exactly. It all just kind of goes away. So the moon, though, is completely different because the moon doesn't have an atmosphere, doesn't have rain, doesn't have wind, doesn't have any geology. There's no earthquakes. There's like very tiny lunar quakes there, but there's no volcanoes. There's no. There's nothing to like, destroy anything you leave there. And so it's often said that Neil Armstrong's footprints will last there for millions of years. And that's just a footprint inside.

[Joe Rogan]

Footprint will.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, just the imprint of his boot will last for millions of years. How long will the Apollo landers last on the moon? We don't even know. We're trying to calculate that. My team right now, actually, with a science project on that. But it will plausibly last until the sun engulfs the moon. The sun will one day get so big, it engulfs the Earth and moon. And that happened about 5 billion years. So probably that stuff will be there long, long after we're gone. And an alien, you know, it might stumble across the moon. Because the thing is with the Earth, the Earth is like a beacon for other aliens. Let's say there's an alien other side of the galaxy right now, now 100,000 light years away from us. But they could build their own James Webb, maybe a super James Webb, and they will be able to see the Earth. And they'd say, look, we can tell this planet has oxygen. We can tell this planet's got oceans, it's got land, it's got even. Probably tell it's got people on it eventually. But even because the light time travel effect, they'd be able to, you know, they'd be looking back basically 100,000 years ago. So maybe they wouldn't see civilization, but they'd still see that we have a rich bias for. So they would know. Here's the galactic map, this guy right here, the Earth, the solar system, there's something special about this guy. There's life on it. There's like stuff happening on this planet and not just simple life. Oxygen is a sign of complex life. So they would know this is a unique, interesting planet. I mean, this is like a good reason for alien tourism. If you an alien tourist, the Earth I think would stand out as like, this is one of the best places to go in the whole universe.

[Joe Rogan]

Why is oxygen in particular viewed that way for complex life?

[David Kipping]

Yeah, so, so oxygen is a product of photosynthesis. That's the only way it's made on the Earth at least. So this is. It took the development of cyanobacteria and plant life to lead to this. So that only happened about two and a half billion years ago. And before that, for the previous 2 billion years, we just had simple microbial life that was basically living off chemical gradients. And that's much easier to do from a internal machinery perspective of life. Life to develop photosynthesis was a pretty big deal for life and it took a, you know, significant advancement. Once you've got oxygen in the atmosphere, it was possible to have much more metabolism inside cells. So you start to see the development of eukaryote cells, which is really what we are. We are eukaryotes. And that allows for much more efficient energy production once you've got oxygen. So once you've got the energy, you can do more stuff. You can, you can. Then animals start to develop and multicellular life starts to develop about a billion years ago ago. So all of that is likely, we think, conditional upon having an oxygen rich atmosphere. So that's a good sign. There's something interesting going on here. So I think an alien 100,000 years, you know, 100,000 light years away would look at the Earth 100,000 years ago. They'd be like, something's going on here. Let's send a ship. And it's going to take that ship, probably, unless someone has a warp drive or something, it's probably going to take me a damn long time to get over here. We're probably long gone by the time it gets over here, here. But they would maybe be able to detect something we leave behind. Or Maybe this happened 3 billion years ago. Maybe 3 billion years ago. They looked at the Earth and sure, there was no oxygen back then, but they could still see probably there was life on the Earth. They would detect life and be like, hey, maybe in a few billion years some smart creature might develop on that planet. We're not going to be here in 3 billion years. We're probably going to be dead by then. But let's send something over for those guys. That's the best way for us to communicate. So there might be a time capsule, a beacon, which is really the, you know, obviously the plot of 2001 Space Odyssey hidden in our solar system. And the best place to put it would not be the Earth, but would be underneath the surface of the moon because you'd be protected from micrometeorites. There's no weathering, there's no volcanism. So that would be the perfect place. And there are caves on the moon. These are lava tubes. So when the moon first formed, there was a little bit of volcanism when it was first forming. And it left these caverns as lava flowed underneath the surface. So there's these like cathedral sized tubes underneath the surface of the, of the moon, which if we seal those off, by the way, that's a perfect place for a moon base because then you could have atmosphere in these tubes.

[Joe Rogan]

Maybe we have.

[David Kipping]

Maybe we. Maybe someone's done that. Maybe that's what Musk's gonna be doing. I don't know. I'd love to see a moon base do that. That and. Yeah, that's like a super trivial place to put something because you literally just drive down the hole and dump something there. You don't even have to dig around. And we haven't explored those things at all. So to me, that's very exciting like that. If I was thinking logically in our current day and age, what is the best bet for me to. If I want to maximize the probability of detection of something for us, something that could be found by an alien species, that's what I would do. If I build a radio beacon. That's. That's a crappy suggestion because that's only gonna last 100 years and it'll break at best. Right. It's not gonna last that long. So you need something that can not require an active power system, that can somehow be an information rich beacon in a obvious place that an alien might look.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, it's like I was here. Yeah, we're gone, but I was here. Yeah, now they're talking. Maybe. I hope I saw this. Right. I forget who it was, but one of the guys not at NASA but in the government talking about space exploration, was talking about last week, like going back to the moon and how they're planning that and whatever. When you talk to like all the people who don't believe they went, we went to the moon. I do. To be clear.

[David Kipping]

Kardashian doesn't, by the way.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, she does.

[David Kipping]

She's.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, yeah, she's on that train.

[David Kipping]

That's what I read, that she's now a moon. A moon truther, I think they call themselves.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, she went all in good well, the, the, the one thing like when they'll bring it up that is quite interesting is the fact that we went in 69 with people and we haven't gone since. What, what is the logic? Because I would think like the rock that orbits in our system right there, we would want to know everything about that even if we're not going to like colonize it or something. Like there's, there's resources we can definitely get out of exploring that and being there all the time. Obviously we take pictures of it and scans and everything so we know stuff. But like why, why haven't we gone back?

[David Kipping]

Yeah, I think this is more politics and economics than science. Right. So there's lots we can learn about the moon scientifically, but you don't necessarily have to have humans there to learn that. And we've keep sending rovers and satellites there. We've, we've been doing that ever since the Apollo era. So we've certainly been sending stuff there, just not human beings. But why politically don't we do it? I think the, you know, obviously the space race is a big part of it. That's why we went. It wasn't, wasn't. Yeah. The reason we probably put boots on the moon wasn't for a scientific experiment. You know, that's what Neil, that's not what Neil Armstrong was actually there doing.

[Joe Rogan]

Say we did it.

[David Kipping]

He was there, he was there for prestige. It was to show off that, hey, we, we can do this and you can't or we can do it before you, it was, it was flexing and once we'd flexed and we'd done that a few times, what, what was the point of staying there? I mean it already, we'd already established we're the top dog at that point. There was, the Soviets had given up on their moon probe. They never put a man, man on the moon the entire time. By the time we'd put like 13, I think astronauts, I think water in the moon, so there was, there was nothing more to prove. And it costs an absolute bomb to do it. Right. It's so expensive to fly to the moon with very, very little. Well, there's no economic return really of flying to the moon. You bring back some moon rocks and you can throw those on ebay, but you're not, it's not really paying the bills. So there's, it's just, it is you know, a desert. Desert. Right. So it's very difficult. If we discovered, you know, here's, here's a counter universe in this multi dimensional universe stuff I always love to think about this. Imagine if the moon was just a little bit bigger than it was. It's about 1.25 the mass of the earth, I believe. So 1% the mass. Now one, it's because it's so low mass, it doesn't have enough gravity to hold onto an atmosphere. That's why it's a vacuum basically when you walk on the surface. But if it was say 10% the mass, mass of the Earth, which is about this mass of Mars, it would be big enough to hold onto an atmosphere. And so it is quite. And then it's in the habitable zone right now. It's a world which has an atmosphere, which is the right distance from the start to have life. And the Earth has water delivered likely from comets. We believe that comets smash into the Earth and delivered all the water. The Moon would have got that same delivery system, would have had that same Amazon prime delivery of all that water line on the surface. And so everything would have been there for it to have had life. And so Neil Armstrong, imagine this alternate history. Neil Armstrong sets foot, and he doesn't need an astronaut suit. He's setting foot in shorts and a T shirt and he's still on a beach. And imagine how different the next 60 years of history would have been had the Moon had been a habitable world that we could just basically move into right away. Real estate, the size of Africa, this lap, the land mass about the center of Africa. So it would have totally transformed society. So if that happened, I'm sure we would have been going back to the moon constantly. But if it's just a dusty desert of moon dust with very little, you know, economic value for us, it just comes down to money there's any point doing it.

[Joe Rogan]

It also feels like when you look over the last five, six decades, I'll just speak for this country more than anything, but you could probably say this in different places around the world. World, the interest for a while there waned. In space, it wasn't the same. Like back then. I was like, oh my God, we can go to space. Which is, that's how it should be, in my opinion. I love space. But, you know, if there's, if there's one really positive thing about Elon getting so involved with this in, in his adult life is that as you've seen him become the celebrity over the last 10, 20 years, him talking about it all the time has people thinking about it, a lot more people interested in again, which would make sense now with even something like the Moon that lacks the resources for you to want to spend the money to even go there. But it's like if you have more interest and you have more economics from the private side pouring into the space.

[David Kipping]

Well, it.

[Joe Rogan]

You could go to the Moon too.

[David Kipping]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

It is fascinating, though, when you consider you could have a planet like Mars that may be down the line. You could actually put humans on and they could live there, as opposed to what you said about the Moon. Like, that's what makes that a little bit more, I don't know, sexy to go look at. But the Moon tunnels, you were saying, like those caverns that they have, you said that was from. There was some sort of volcanic.

[David Kipping]

Yeah. When, when the Moon first formed, it was just a big ball of lava. It slowly cooled down. There was still some active volcanism for a while. But, yeah, the, you know, there's. When you look at the Moon, you see there's these light patches and dark patches maybe throughout a picture, just. Yeah. Photo of the Moon. Moon, yeah. So all those dark patches are lava flows. They're called maria. So those were ancient lava flows that happened, you know, like 4 billion years ago and the lot. And there was, you know, they covered up these cratered regions. There was probably when the Moon first formed, like tons and tons of rocks just smashing into it, like every day. And that's why there's so many craters on the Moon. The Earth, of course, would have had the same thing, but it's all weathered away by now. But the Moon doesn't have that weathering process, so that's why it's covered in craters. But the dark patches are where lava came up from the surface and smothered up over those craters, filled it in. And so, yeah, that's a direct evidence that we have that the Moon did once have lava flows and then ran out. From sounding experiments and mapping from these satellites, we can see there's evidence for these lava tubes that are on the. Underneath the surface. So they're totally unexplored. What they really look like, we don't really know, but I think it'd be super exciting to go there. I think what's really wild about the Moon is that it's like, it's a bit like simulation theory kind of stuff. But it is wild that we have the Moon and Mars. It's almost like if you were playing a game in space race game or something, you would want to have an object that was close enough that you could do it with 1960s technology. But if the Moon wasn't there, we probably would never have bothered developing as much rocketry as we had. The moon is only a three day ride with 1960s tech. And you can land and you can do it in 1960s tech. That's kind of crazy. But now to go to the next step, to go to Mars is much, much harder. But still it's a rocky planet. Imagine if it was another Jupiter or another Venus. We can't land on Venus. Venus will crush you immediately the moment we step onto the surface. Mars is like an ideal next stepping stone. If you would like to design a game to try and like nudge the player through a tutorial mode of like, you know, learn how to do this and then you can do the next thing and then you can go to the stars. You would put the moon here and you would put Mars there and you wouldn't make it too easy. You'd make it challenging enough that maybe like having the moon be truly habitable would just be too easy. So you wouldn't really like push yourself hard enough. So yeah, I do kind of think it's wild because the moon is weird. We have the biggest moon in a relative size sense out of any planet in the solar system. It's, you know, it's, it's, it's a quarter of the size of the Earth.

[Joe Rogan]

Could we like send, I mean you talk about these unexplored basically like tunnels in a way. Is there a way for us to put a satellite up there that gets into the atmosphere of the moon and then you know, you run some little drones down into those areas and take video.

[David Kipping]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Or am I thinking that far too simply?

[David Kipping]

Yeah, I think maybe you can Google like moon lava tube robot and people have thought about putting like these snake, snake robots that can, I'm saying like.

[Joe Rogan]

Let'S do it, let's go fund this like crowdfund it or something. Yeah, I'm in.

[David Kipping]

Maybe you can't find. But yeah, I've seen, I've seen these cool visualizations of, of different robots that we could put down. It is, it is a tricky. Obviously you can't put a rover down there because, because it's a pretty steep descent to get into them.

[Joe Rogan]

This is China, but oh, China's doing it. Oh, now we gotta be.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, we're different. Different countries obviously have different ideas about exactly how to explore these caves, but someone's gonna do it. And yeah, maybe, you know, there used to be the X Prize. The Google. Was it Google X Prize or which was like, you know, we'll give you. What was it like $10 million or something for the first person to land on the moon and take a photo. And someone won that prize. Someone landed on the moon, took a photo and beamed it back to the Earth and they won this X prize of maybe it's $100 million. It was a ton of money.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, wow.

[David Kipping]

But yeah, maybe we could like get, I don't know, Elon or someone else to say he's got a ton of money lying around to say, look, I will give the first person to send photos from the inside of one of these lava tubes a billion, billion dollars. And that will spur like a huge bunch of these teams to try and get the investment to develop it.

[Joe Rogan]

What is the cooperation like these days among countries, be it NASA and some of the other, other space programs of other countries, because we're dealing with something that doesn't have a border. I'm just using the moon as an example right now. Forget Mars even. But like, it's unchartered territory. Someone doesn't have to get permission from someone, someone else to go there because no one has like legislative authority over it. So how do we even organize? And what is the organization, I should say, of like trying to figure out some of these space missions these days between countries?

[David Kipping]

Yeah, it's, it's. I mean, there is a lot of collaboration, but I'm not sure it's going in the right direction at the moment. So you look at James Webb and it was launched by the Europeans, for instance. So the Americans built it, the Europeans launched it. You look at. And then a lot of that, some of, you know, a lot of telescopes there is, some parts of it are built in Europe or Japan and they're shipped over. And we put it all together, we assemble it maybe in the US and launch it. And there's lots of, you know, Japanese missions which share data with us. There's again, lots of European collaboration, I think China and Russia maybe there's less scientists, certainly way less scientific collaboration because there's more obviously politically of a tense situation there with those nations. But historically that wasn't always true. I mean, the International Space Station has had plenty of cosmonauts on board as well as astronauts. And they don't fight, they get unwell.

[Joe Rogan]

That's good.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, everyone gets no cops up there. So there's no one punching each other, as far as we know, in the International Space Station between these nations. But I mean, astronauts are picked to be like, that's part of their training is to be like, you're not going to pick someone who's an asshole who's going to fly a jerk in the space station? You want someone who's pretty easy to get along with to be up there. I mean, that's a nap.

[Joe Rogan]

Picking Matt Damon in interstellar, basically.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, right. He's a bit of a jerk. Yeah. You know when someone with like a real really annoying habit to be, like, up there, I really like making this sound. You don't want that going with you for the whole time.

[Joe Rogan]

So much can go wrong. What was the thing? Maybe this is like one of those things pop in my head. I can't remember if I read it or if it was a joke, but, like, China was trying to develop something on the dark side of the moon. Am I totally making that up?

[David Kipping]

No, there's a bunch of. But, yeah, I think China's interested. So China has this giant radio telescope called fast. We used to have one called arbo, okay. But it got destroyed during one of the recent storms, so it's just in pieces now. Unfortunately, it's in Puerto Rico, and the NSF National Science foundation supported it, but they didn't have enough money to basically refund it and rebuild it. So we lost. It used to be the biggest in the world, and then China overtook us and built their own one. But radio telescopes are basically just giant, giant dishes. You know, they can be huge, like hundreds. I think the. The fastest is like 500 meters or something across. Absolutely gigantic. And the reason why you can build them so big is because they don't have to be very smooth. So unlike James Webb or an optical mirror, it's a plea. A piece of glass that's incredibly smooth. It's like, has to be smoothed down to like, nanometer scale. So it requires lots and lots of polishing costs, a bomb to make those things, and any slight piece of dust or anything that's going to ruin it. But a radio telescope, it can basically matter concrete. And that's smooth enough to, like, you just pour concrete out. And it turns out some of the craters on the moon are almost the right shape, right? So they kind of look the right shape as, as a big dish. And so you probably, with a little bit of modification to those things, could use them as natural radio telescopes. And if you put it on the far side of the Moon, it would be really advantageous because, you know, one of the problems that alien hunters have, one of the ways we try to look for aliens is to listen to their radio signals, but we just are talking too much ourselves, right? There's all these, like, 4G 5G towers going up everywhere. There's, you know, people have got microwaves that they open and send out signals. There's radio channels all over the place, TV channels. So there's just way too much noise to like, really clearly hear. So that's one of the big challenges of doing this work. Work. But on the far side of the moon, there's nothing. It's just. It's just dead quiet. So it would be like the perfect place to like, really listen in and dial in to radio signals from alien civilizations and also for astrophysics as well.

[Joe Rogan]

Can we pull that up, Joe? China, dark side and moon. Just to see what. Because it just gets so interesting, like you were saying politically, when you're talking about, like, superpowers trying to do this. And now I'm America's like, well, we want the dark side of the moon too.

[David Kipping]

Well, there is no dark side of the moon. But it's far. It's far side far.

[Joe Rogan]

I'm sorry, I'm so used to Pink Floyd.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, yeah. That's a common misconception. So.

[Joe Rogan]

China has successfully completed the Chang 6 mission, which returned the first ever samples from the far side of the moon to Earth in June 2024. The mission involved a robotic lander and rover that collected about 2 kg of rocks and soil from the south pole Aitken Basin and, and delivered them to Inner Mongolia, China. The samples are now being analyzed by scientists to learn more about the moon's history and the differences between its near and far sides.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, they grab some rocks off the far side and brought them over. Yeah. The reason the Apollo astronauts didn't go to the far side is because you. The same reason I just mentioned you'd lose radio contact with the Earth.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[David Kipping]

So if something went wrong and they're out there, it's just those two guys by themselves, they're screwed. So we, all the astronaut missions we ever launched have always been on the near side, so it's easy to be in constant communication with them.

[Joe Rogan]

And you said the moon's approximately 1% the mass of the Earth?

[David Kipping]

It's about 1% the mass, but about 20, almost 25% the size.

[Joe Rogan]

Right. So you're talking about a big space right there.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, it's huge. The land mass is, I think about the size of Africa roughly, is sort of the landmass you've got to work with. So, you know, if you're a real estate developer, there's a lot of love stuff.

[Joe Rogan]

They got one of those in the White House right now.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, let's See if it's.

[Joe Rogan]

If he gets him any ideas. All right, Joe, let's get back to our list. We're, we're like halfway through it. I like how this is going. Just weaving in and out of this thing. Coming back to three. I.

[David Kipping]

Good about side quests.

[Joe Rogan]

That's. That's it. That's. I love side quests. I'm from Jersey. It's what we do. All right, number six, talking about Three Eye Atlas. This is a part of the 10.

[David Kipping]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Ideas AVI Loeb have that makes this different. He says its gas plume contains only 4% water by mass, a primary constituent of familiar comets.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, so it's producing water, but maybe not as much water as you'd expect for a comet. But the fact it produces water at all is exactly what comets do. So, I mean, this, I mean, what Abby's been sort of suggesting in a big more zoom out perspective from all of these points is that this is like a, you know, maybe a Trojan horse, right? So maybe this is. It's like dressed up to look like a comet, but it's actually an alien vehicle that's. That's trying to trick us. And I think you can't really have it both ways, right? Either, either it's an alien spaceship that's just clearly detectable, or it's pretending to be a comet. But this isn't either of those things, right? Because if it's dressing up to look like a comet, it's not doing a very good job because otherwise we wouldn't have any anomalies. Everything about it would look like a comet. So the fact any of these things are anomalies means it doesn't really match up with the Trojan horse hypothesis at all. Because surely aliens, if they're selling spaceships here, would be smart enough to not have 10 things which all give it away as being obviously alien. So, yeah, what's the gain there? So I just don't understand even the premise of picking up these individual things. But I think this particular point, it's just like, yeah, it's producing water, maybe not quite as much as a typical comet, but like, that's exactly what comets do. They produce water.

[Joe Rogan]

That's the other problem, though. If it were like invading or something like that, that's not, you would think, and everything's a hypothetical because it's really impossible to think the way another advanced, perhaps far more advanced civilization would think and how they even think, but you would think that it wouldn't be dressed up in any way. We wouldn't even know it's there. You would have to. I. I don't assume is a strong word, but when my mind starts to think about this stuff and you're talking about potentially civilization, a civilization that has figured out how to basically like bend time, move at the speed of light, do all these crazy things. If they figured that out, they've probably figured out like, invisibility or other things like that to the point that, you know, when people talk about, like seeing UFOs or something like that in our atmosphere, I mean, I don't know, maybe it's like, I've always thought that, like, they're simulating that. Like, ah, let's. Let's show them one just to see how that idiot will react in the desert and tell everyone about it. So if you were making a 1km long or whatever it is, like, you know, Trojan horse to come here, it wouldn't be the kind of thing that I would want. Like, I don't know, trying to think like them Avi Loeb to see and go on Joe Rogan and talk about like, hey, they're coming. It's right there. There. You know what I mean?

[David Kipping]

Yeah, it's. It's like, you know, the drag queen that can't put makeup on properly. Like, it's like, sure, surely, surely they could figure out a little bit like, why is this such a challenge? Like, yeah, that's what I didn't get at all about this. So I. Yeah, I'm happy to entertain the idea there could be alien spaceships in our solar system. I think it's a really interesting idea. I think we should be looking for them. So whenever Abby said that, I'm like, yeah, I'm with you, brother. Like, let's. We should have programs to look for that stuff. That's cool. But this object is. Everything about it is. Like, not. Is not that convincing. But, you know, I keep saying. Oh, I'm just saying it's a possibility. Like, you know, I'm just. I'm just saying we should consider this as a possibility. But I mean, that's kind of a slippery slate because then you could just say, well, what about this? I'm just saying this could be alien. You know, we should. Everything you say about anything. Should it?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, it is.

[David Kipping]

There you go, right? It's supposed to be alien. So if you, if you just say, well, I'm just saying it could be alien. Like, where do you stop? I mean, right, this. Everything about this looks pretty comet. Like, there's. There's plenty of other stuff that you could, you know, chuck around the, you know, the word alien on. So certainly by scientific standards, I get it's a cool and attractive idea and it's jazzy and people are drawn to it, but it, this is far off the scientific standards of evidence that we would want to, to have for a genuine alien detection.

[Joe Rogan]

You have to think about what the effect is of popularization and how you do it right? Because, hey, aliens are very interesting. I'm fascinated by it. I look at the size of the known universe and I'm like, it seems impossible that there's not some sort of intelligent civilization out there, wherever that is. But then when you're getting to like, the evidence of, oh, have they been here? Are they here? What are they? That's where it gets weird because people, you know, I don't like to shoot everything down, but people make a lot of claims and then you have the government getting involved, which, you know, let's.

[David Kipping]

Call it what it is.

[Joe Rogan]

They got a job to do that invites in disinformation on purpose for sure. And people start to run with these narratives that, because this, then that, and you're making 40 million leaps when you do that. So when you start talking about things, things in space that seem to have, I mean, we're through, like six or seven of these seem to have some rather viable scientific explanations to point to something different. I think you run the risk of actually setting the seriousness of that conversation back if you just start labeling something alien. It's a lot of fun. But, you know, I, I've enjoyed over the past year talking more with physicists and stuff, not the Avi Lobe is not a physicist, to be clear, like he is. But I'm saying, like, I've enjoyed talking with, with, you know, you science guys, if you will, because you look at things based on what is the scientific evidence of what I can see, rather than like, oh, and, you know, in 1964 we saw one in Socorro. It's more like, here's how it could happen, or here's what it is, or here's what we're looking at. And that I think the conversation needs to be more there and then not fall into kind of the trap of like just immediately running to, I see it. So I want to believe it.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, I, I, I don't want to, I don't want us to leave 3 Atlas because it's going to leave the solar system. It is, yeah. It's on its way out. And we're going to get many more of these things. Right? This is Just the third. And we've just built a new telescope called Vero Room. It's going to detect a ton of these things. So we're going to get like hundreds of these objects in the next, like, probably decade or so. So this is going to become like normal of having like tons of these objects. And I think people will just stop getting so worked up after it's like number 72 of these things. Right. You're just not going to be quite as engaged. And I hope we don't leave it thinking that, oh, the only interest scientists have in these objects is alien or not alien, because this object is a relic from another star system. Right. We are, we would love one day, if we could, to send astronauts to a nearby star, land on the ground just like the Chinese did on the backside of the moon, pick up a rock and bring it home and be like, let's look at this rock. This rock is from a freaking another solar system. Let's look at it, let's dissect, let's see what's going on. All of their geology is different, their chemistry is different. Everything's crazy there. These objects are that if we could intercept them, we could get a ship, one of our own rockets could launch and catch up with these objects. We could land on it. Maybe not a human land on it. Yeah, we could land on these things, we could scoop up a rock and just like we did for the moon, and we could bring it back to the Earth and we could look at them.

[Joe Rogan]

You could. Wait, was this the one that was going 60km a second and we could land on that?

[David Kipping]

We could catch it with that? Yeah, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

With what?

[David Kipping]

Yeah, the best, the best way. I mean, Avi was actually suggesting the Juno spacecraft could maybe do it. Juno doesn't have enough fuel, but if it had a bit more fuel, it wouldn't have been able to catch up with it. Juno's around Jupiter, but actually some of the Mars. If you were launching from Mars, it'd be actually pretty easy to catch up with it. If we had. If Elon Musk was a few years ahead and we had stuff on Mars already, we could have easily caught up with it. Yeah, this one's pretty fast, but Omomu and Boris could have easily landed on as well. Well, if we'd had stuff in space ready to go. So the question is, like, you need to have a rocket just hanging out in the solar system, just waiting to turn on its afterburner, basically, and then like, okay, there it is, let's go, let's Go get it. But we could do it. And then that would be. This is what's so cool about these objects. This would be material that we would have in the laboratory from another star system. There could be simple life buried inside this thing. I'm not, I mean let's forget like the advanced alien thing. There could be microbes buried inside the core of this something little crust. Right. So that would be mind boggling. We'd have potentially there could be DNA traces on this thing. So that's what gets me excited.

[Joe Rogan]

Wait, when you say DNA traces meaning like a trace from an, an actual advance civilization events.

[David Kipping]

Okay, forget the event. Just. Just something living.

[Joe Rogan]

Just something living.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, I mean we know that happens like the, if you go to Antarctica, which was about Antarctica earlier, that's the best place to find rocks from Mars. So Mars gets hit with meteors and it knocks rocks off Mars and those rocks fly up into space and some of them hit the earth and they hit all over the Earth. But Antarctica, they're really easy to see because it's all white. So if there's a black rock there, it's like super obvious. So people skidoo around and they find these black rocks, they bring them back and we can reconstruct which, you know where they came from. And a good fraction of them do come from Mars and we can study them. And that's how we've learned so much about what Mars is like without even visiting. It is just by, by aliens. They come to us, we don't have to go to them. And these objects are like that we don't have. This kind of solves in so many ways the interstellar travel problem. We don't have to go to these other planets. It'd be great if we could, but this is like a shortcut. The universe is giving us a cheat code to see what these other planets are like without actually having to go there. So that to me is like by far like the coolest thing about these objects. Whether it's an alien spaceship or not is obviously a super sensational hypothesis. But I, even if that's not true, we shouldn't think, oh, who gives a. About these objects? Of course, like they're still like amazing, amazing.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like you, you put the term on it like alien. Then when it's not, people are like, oh, it goes from 100 to 0. But this is an unbelievable, like you said, potential relic from somewhere else. But so you said they're simulating that it will leave the Solar system. Do we have a length of time that that'll take, take for that to happen?

[David Kipping]

So estimated it's behind the sun right now. It's just coming, it's just poking back out. And then it will make its closest approach to the Earth in mid December. Okay. But it's really far out from the Earth. It's not going to hit us. No way. It's really, really far out. And then it will, I think it passes next to Jupiter in sort of the spring and then after that, you know, just keeps on going to the solar system. Yeah. So we can observe it for about the next year or so. We can keep, keep observing it.

[Joe Rogan]

Which means as it does that that'll also kind of take away the whole alien invasion argument because yeah, it would.

[David Kipping]

Just fly off and yeah, I mean Abby's I think said maybe it will release a bunch of mini probes on Christmas Day. That, because that's close to the closest approach to the Earth and then those mini probes. But I'm like, I give that very low probability. Yeah, I mean it'd be wild if it was true. But I could say about anything, I mean, I could say, you know, maybe the nearest star will suddenly shoot a laser at us tomorrow on Christmas Day. Like yeah, sure, I can say that, but I don't have any reason to believe that's going to happen.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, no, I, I agree. It's also though, when you're talking about something this size, like we know the story, the dinosaurs and it hit the Earth and everything and it, and it wasn't like a huge area, it was like a few kilometers or something like that, but it was enough to on impact destroy like climates and up the whole thing. You know, if something like this, whether it was Three Eye Atlas or some other mass rock comet was coming towards the Earth these days, do we have the technology to be able to destroy something like that before it gets here?

[David Kipping]

Nukes really is probably our best bet. So yeah, you wouldn't actually probably blow up the asteroid or the comet. You, you would actually probably detonate your nuke off to the side of it. So if you detonate, if you blow up the actual thing like they're doing Armageddon, you just, of course you get a bunch of like cross crap that then still on the same trajectory. What you really want to do is, is fly your nuke maybe a couple of kilometers off to the side, detonate it, and then that blast wave nudges it off into a different path. Right. So it remains largely intact, but it just gets deflected into a different position. So that would be your last ditch thing. So if you didn't have much time, that would be what you would do. If you had more time, if you had, you know, maybe years to work with, maybe you could, you know, some comets, we can trace them and we can see, oh, it's going to come by in 50 years and have a close approach to us. You can't do that for interstellar asteroids, but for comets in our own backyard, you can do that. So for those it's even easier. All you need to do is, you know, you could actually just paint one side of a rock dark or silver and that'll do it. So if you have an asteroid and you paint one side of it white, you just focus paint, bomb it on one side white. The sun's radiation nudges the white side more than the dark side. And so it would actually nudge it enough that you could deflect it from the Earth just with paint.

[Joe Rogan]

No kidding.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, just from the deflection of the, of the sun's radiation.

[Joe Rogan]

We got that technology.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, we got that technology. Yeah. So that'd be even easier. The danger, the biggest threat of these interstellar asteroids is that they are moving very fast. And we were kind of lucky with three ATLAS in a sense, it is pretty big and it's easy to find, but it doesn't have to be that big. If it was 100 meters across, that's still a city killer. It's still, you know, potentially enough to knock out New York City if it hit us. And that, that would be harder for us to see. And the fact it's moving so fast doesn't give you a lot of time. So you might only detect it like two weeks prior to impact and then you're kind of in trouble. Like then it's hard to like get together in time to, to do something.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, that's where you're throwing all the money at the problem. Yeah, you know, that's we're coming together and doing something.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, yeah. Maybe that's the way we unify.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, yeah, right. Comets coming. Here we go. All right, so we're at number seven on this list now. It shows extreme. It being three eye atlas shows extreme negative polarization unprecedented for all known comments, including two I Borisov with a likelihood below 1%.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, I think this is, it's also weird. It is, it's another oddity, but again, it's, it's hard to compare to like. Yeah, compared to two other objects. Sure. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

You're not comparing to hundreds or something.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, so. So I would just sort of hold my breath on that one and wait, let's revisit that in 10 years and I bet it'll be totally normal. Okay. Amongst the hundreds we find.

[Joe Rogan]

All right, number eight. It arrived from a direction coincident with the radio quote, wow. Signal unquote to within 9 degrees with a likelihood of 0.6%. I don't know what that means.

[David Kipping]

Okay, so there was a radio signal set to it in the 1970s called the wow. Signal that a lot of people think is the most convenient, convincing evidence of an alien transmission we've ever received. It was detected by the Big Ear telescope in Ohio State. And it's still anomalous. There's no. Yeah, people. It was just like literally when we had like print, you know, ticker tape printouts, and you just see this like beep. This like one part of the sky suddenly get loud in the radio. I've actually written papers about that signal before, trying to figure out exactly what it is. It's a mystery. It remains a mystery. It's never repeated. And that's kind of curious. I've been advocating that we should observe it more intensely because a lot of people, a lot of Stromans said, hey, the fact it hasn't repeated means it's not aliens. But we haven't actually looked at that carefully. So I've been advocating we need to have more serious effort to survey that guy. And so this. If you look at whereabouts in the sky, that comes from three atlases coming nine degrees off. But nine degrees is a lot. I mean, it's actually not in space close at all. I mean, if you stretch that out. Oh, it's crazy kind of distances, you're talking like tens of thousands of light years separated. So this is, this just isn't. It's too far to be like a meaningful. If it was like exactly where it was within like 0.1 degrees or something, then I'd be like, okay, I've just got a point. But nine degrees is just.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. We're thinking about it in near term effects. Like if I do this right here.

[David Kipping]

Right. But if I do 45 by.

[Joe Rogan]

By.

[David Kipping]

By huge cosmic distances and you're talking about things which are. Yeah. So far apart from each other.

[Joe Rogan]

Not even close.

[David Kipping]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Okay. All right. Number nine. Near perihelion, it brightened faster than any known comet and was bluer than the sun. Maybe we can pull up an image of this again.

[David Kipping]

Thief.

[Joe Rogan]

So people can observe that.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, it's. Yeah, I Think to this one. It's just. It is. It brightened really fast compared to any known comet. True, true. But it is moving faster than any known.

[Joe Rogan]

Right. I was gonna say this isn't that speed.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, it's maybe not a surprise it's doing that.

[Joe Rogan]

Okay. And that's that wired image right there. Is that.

[David Kipping]

That looks like an artist's impression. Yeah, yeah. I don't think, I don't think this is necessarily a single image. It's just a collection of observations put together. They've pieced that. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Okay, let's go to number 10, wherever that is. All right, so Three Eye Atlets exhibits non gravitational acceleration, which requires massive evaporation of at least 13% of its mass. But preliminary post perihelion images do not show the evidence for it so far.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, I mean, again, this, this is exactly what comets do. They lose a ton of mass when they get close to the sun. It's a ball of ice and snow as it gets close to a freaking star is going to boil off a lot of that snow and ice. So the fact it's losing a load of mass is exactly what a comet should do. So, yeah, I, I don't really get this one as an anomaly. That's just. It's exactly what you should do. I, I think all of these anomalies, by the way, are like changing. So when the, when the first AVI was first writing about this, I think there was only like four or five anomalies. And it's kind of like the list has grown. And that's a little bit precarious as well because you're kind of like, oh, we're doing something else. I'm going to add this on and add this on. But all the stuff that it does that's normal, you don't add on. So, you know, it's again, this kind of like p hacking mentality of just like selectively choosing things to kind of engineer the narrative to be as strange as you want it to be. So I think that's a little bit precarious. And some of the things, I mean, when it was. Some of the initial anomalies that Abby was writing about was the fact it doesn't have a coma. So when it was first detected, we couldn't see any coma or tail off it at all. But that was when it was really far out and they had, you know, really far out in the solar system. And then it started to develop a coma. And so as soon as it had a coma and a tail, that seemed a lot of us, a lot of astronomers were like, oh, that's gonna. Abby's gonna give up on this now, because it's doing the thing that a comet does, which is have a coma tail. He's going to forget about that. But then instead, he said he wrote this on his blog, that actually, I think this is a spaceship that's producing a sheet field. It's like flying off particles to try and protect it from space dust. And it just happens to, like, look very similar to what a comet would do. So again, it's kind of like you're changing the story as you go along. Like, just if it's. If it's a ship and it's not producing anything, then just stick with that hypothesis. And that hypothesis is now out. Like, once you've got observations which undermine your hypothesis, it's rejected. But you can't keep editing the hypothesis on the fly to fit the data in real time because then it's not. That's not science. That's just. That's just story weaving. Right? So this is the big aliens is like such a flexible hypothesis. Aliens can explain anything. So literally anything that happens in the universe in this room, the reason why your mom doesn't call you tomorrow, or the reason why you dropped your coffee down the stairs, you could always just say, oh, aliens did that? And I, I can't prove you wrong. But it doesn't make it a good hypothesis just because it can. It's too malleable and too flexible. I think you really need to see something pretty extraordinary. So, yeah, like I said, if it stopped, if it shined a laser beam at us or something sent a radio emission at us, like, you know, hey, we're here. Like, here's a television signal beamed your way or something, I'd be down with it. But this, everything on this list is, like, very much what comets do. Maybe it's a slightly unusual thing. Think, like, extreme example of what a comet would do. But it's definitely very comet like.

[Joe Rogan]

Everything it's doing, we know approximately how old it. It is. We know where it's coming from, we know the path it's been taking, and therefore the projected path is going to take past that, and it hasn't. Like you, you gave an example early on the conversation. Like, well, if it suddenly went up or down or all around, okay, you might think, like, something's maneuvering that, but it hasn't. There's no evidence to show it's done any of that.

[David Kipping]

Right? And I can't disprove a negative. No One can. So I can't prove to anyone here who's listening who really believes this is an alien spaceship. I can't prove to you it's not an alien spaceship because you can't, you can never prove that something is not alien. I can't prove that anything in this room is not made by an alien. Right. It's impossible to do that. So if you want to like have that as a personal hypothesis, you can. But unless it, unless it does something that nature just absolutely cannot do and it breaks our understanding of nature, then that's the only time that I think that the scientific community, right, are going to get behind it. And look, I think what we all want. Do you really want to have like a personal hypothesis that is just you? I think this thing is alien or I think we all want to convince our peers, we want to convince our friends that what we saw was real, you know, that this was a real alien ship that you encountered. And the only way to get buy in is to provide really compelling evidence that even this, you want the evidence to be so good that even the skeptics are like, I can't, I can't fault you, man. Like, you're right. Like there's no, you know, it's like Michael Jordan was so good that even the people that hated Michael Jordan were like, damn, he's the best. Like, there's just no, there's no way around that. And that's what we want in science. We want it to be like so clear and crisp that even the skeptics have to shut up because, and that's how all of science works. It's not particular to aliens. If you're going to claim you've got like a new theory of gravity or you think you've discovered a new exoplanet, it has to be that everyone who comes at that data is going to arrive at the same conclusion no matter what different assumptions they're making. So this is, and I think AUS is like, has got an even bigger responsibility to sort of, you know, take this more carefully because we're so invested.

[Joe Rogan]

In it 100% and it's like you can't get too excited about it. And what it seems like from what you're telling me today is that, you know, in for this particular argument, a lot of the scientific community seems to be on the other side of Avi Loeb and saying like, this is probably what we're looking at, it's probably not an alien spaceship because the evidence like this is a lot of this is Too chancery. I'm making up a word there, but it's not. It's not like, intense, like, down to 40 million Z1 evidence or anything like that.

[David Kipping]

Everything's on. The on is. Is either completely exactly what a comet should do, like, have a tail in a comet and produce those gases, or it's comet like. But. Like an extreme comet. It's a. But. Yeah. If it was a Trojan horse, like, why would it. It. Why wouldn't they do a better job if that's true? So I just. I think the alien hypothesis is. Is. Is in deep trouble with this object. But I do admire Avi for pushing because this is. I mean, it's easy to. To say this and get ridiculed, right? And I think Abby has been ridiculed for that. And I don't ridicule Avi for pushing the alien hypothesis because I do think we need. It's easy to get stuck in groupthink and get too conservative and just, like, ridicule anyone who tries to do something. Something different and. And push the envelope. So even though I disagree with Abby that I don't think this is alien, I'm not gonna, like, throw on him and say he's an idiot for saying this. I think it's. He's. He's, you know, pursuing his scientific ideas, and I disagree with it in a respectful way, but I'm not gonna, like, personally attack him as saying, like, he's. He's a doofus for, like, coming up with this idea.

[Joe Rogan]

That's how it should be. This is what science is supposed to be. We've lost sight of this in the modern error.

[David Kipping]

And it's not just science.

[Joe Rogan]

It's every part of culture. It's like you throw mud on each other to get more clicks, and therefore every. Everyone who disagrees with you is an idiot. And that doesn't get anyone anywhere. I've always said, you know, the greatest lie we ever perpetuated on humanity was that science and religion were competing. They're both seeking the answer to the same thing. And then I.

[David Kipping]

We.

[Joe Rogan]

That's just been downstream to everything else, be it politics, culture, whatever it may be.

[David Kipping]

Be.

[Joe Rogan]

We are always thinking that, you know, the other idea can exist for us to exist or whatever. And that's not how it is. You're constantly trying to find things that one day are going to disprove every single thing that, like, a brilliant guy like Albert Einstein came up with. That's the whole point, you know?

[David Kipping]

I agree. It's. It's kind of a Business. Like if you're an entrepreneur and you start a company, your first company might fail and the second might fail. But maybe if you, if you keep getting chances, you'll eventually figure out how it works and break through. Through. And America is great because, you know, it has really good like loan forgiveness and like it lets people keep trying. Whereas if you try, if you start a business in France and it fails, like you're not allowed to get a loan for like 50 years. Right. They just, they don't want you to ever try again.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[David Kipping]

And I do kind of worry maybe Abby's wrong about this. But hey, maybe he'll be right about another signal. Maybe not a comment, but something else in the future. And I'm worried that a lot of scientists will just not pay attention to him because they're like, you've burnt your reputation, dude, with this one. I'm not, I'm not going to listen to, to anything you say ever again. And that's, that's also very close minded. Like we have to, it's like Icarus, right? You're gonna, you have to fly close to the sun to take to, to really advance. And maybe in this case, in my opinion, I think the wings are melting off and he's falling. But we should keep giving the dude a chance to like, with evidence, to push the envelope.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you bring evidence, it should be evaluated.

[David Kipping]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And if the evidence is good, then you take a farther look. If it's things that maybe can be refuted in good scientific, mathematical ways, then you go, okay, this isn't the one, pal.

[David Kipping]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

You know, it shouldn't be that hard. But when did you like, did you grow up wanting to be an astrophysicist? Were you just fascinated with space as a little kid?

[David Kipping]

I was always fascinated with space. Yeah. I remember loving planets and the universe when I was a kid. I loved sci fi, loved Star Trek, loved Star Trek. Growing up, Next Generation was my best bag. Yeah. And Star wars, all that kind of stuff. And then, yeah, I thought I was going to be a physicist. When I was about sort of 12, 13, I was getting really interested in physics and I had a great high school teacher, Mr. Fox, and he gave me a load of physics books on the side. You should check this out. And I was reading it, I was like, oh, wow, this is crazy. Like there's neutrinos passing through my brain right now. It's like all this particles everywhere. It kind of was like an enlightenment, like when you realize the world so much more complicated than you think? So I studied physics at college, and then when I was at college, I started to come back to space because I got the impression for. Right, or maybe it's pretty wrong. I think it is partially wrong, but that to make progress in physics was. Was getting really hard, that you needed like billions and billions of dollars to, you know, have these huge teams of thousands of people. And you were just going to be one very small cog in that machine. Whereas in astronomy, there's a hundred billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy and there's only 8 billion people on Earth. So each of us can have a hundred stars to ourselves. More than that.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[David Kipping]

Just you could have just 100 stars that you yourself could study your whole life. And everyone else could have their own hundred stars. We could all move there and have our. This is my 100 star system that I live on. And each of those would have about 10 planets. And, you know, you could have thousands plants to yourself. Right. So that's, that's just how ridiculous the scale of the universe is. And I realized we are never gonna, like, get bored of this. We're never going to run out of stuff to discover because we only know of a percent of a percent of a percent of what's out there. And in physics, it kind of. I'm sure there's a vast amount we don't know about as well. But it felt to me like all the rapid progress and discovery was happening in the universe.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. So you start to take that journey through school itself, and then you get into that and eventually, like. And you've mentioned this term several times today, I think you started to explain it once, but you developed a specialty in identifying exoplanets and observing them.

[David Kipping]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

So for people out there that just want to understand what that is as a recap, what is an exoplanet?

[David Kipping]

Yeah, it's just a planet that orbits another star. That's what it means. So exo means outside. So extra solar is to is the full name, but we just shorten it to exoplanets. So we know of about 5,000 to 6,000 exoplanets, I believe at the time of writing, which is obviously a lot. We've only discovered those in the last 20 years.

[Joe Rogan]

5,000 to 6,000.

[David Kipping]

About. I think about 6,000 confirmed plants now.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[David Kipping]

And the. The discovery started about 20, 25 years ago. And there's been a, you know, a rapid explosion in discovery over that time. And Yeah, I was in Color College when the first ones were being discovered. And to me, as a Young person. This was like. This is. It's like the gold rush in San Francisco, right, Everyone. You know, as a young person, you're like, this is where all the shit's happening. I want to get over there and pick up some gold for myself. And I've discovered myself, like, probably a dozen planets or something. I'm like, I don't even count them. But, yeah, I've just found therapy cracks myself in my career, which is kind of wild to think about, you know.

[Joe Rogan]

How do you find one?

[David Kipping]

So the way. There's a few different ways. The way I normally use is called the transit method, which is to look for eclipses, basically. So these planets are so far away, thousands of light years away sometimes, that you can't possibly take a photo of them. They're just at that distance. The star and the planet are just a blob of light. You can't possibly see them. But if the orbital inclination is correct, it will sometimes eclipse in front of the star. The same reason why we had, like, the, you know, when the moon eclipsed the sun sun, because that solar eclipse. Maybe you saw those two great American eclipses we had fairly recently in the US which is awesome to see.

[Joe Rogan]

Stare right at it.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, well, you want the glasses, but, yeah, be careful with that. So, yeah, I really enjoyed watching those. And it's the same thing. You can also see transits of Venus. Venus sometimes goes in front of the sun, and you can catch that. You probably need a telescope or a good pair of binoculars to catch those, but those are fun to watch. And so, in the same sense, some of these exoplanets will serendipitously pass in front of their star. And as they do, the star gets dimmed. Dimmer. Right. Because some of the light is being blocked out. So that's what we look for. We just look for these, like, stars that are winking at us, basically just getting, like, a little bit dimmer, and then they get back to normal. And we notice that every 10 days that happens. And so if it happens every 10 days, that means the planet is on an orbital period of 10 days around a star. So that's its year.

[Joe Rogan]

And you can identify that that's a planet versus, you know, some sort of, like, loose piece in space or something like that. Strictly because of the size.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, well, you know, it's an orbiting object. If it repeats the. The size of it basically tells you a lot of the objects we detect are typically like, you know, between the size of Neptune and Jupiter. So that's not debris, obviously, if it's the size of Neptune, that's. That's a pretty big object. Yeah. If you make the planet twice as big, it blocks out four times the amount of light. So that means big plants are really easy to find, but small plants are really hard to find. And the smallest plants we can currently detect are about the size of the moon at best. But typically the the Earth. So we can find Earth sized planets. There's a really beautiful star system called Trappist 1.

[Joe Rogan]

The Trappist 1?

[David Kipping]

Yeah. That I recommend everyone Google at some point. It has. It's the most famous exoplanet system at this point, has seven planets. They're all Earth size, three of them in the habitual zone of the star in the hat.

[Joe Rogan]

Meaning like you could actually land on them and you're not frying to death or freezing.

[David Kipping]

Haptazon here just means that the temperature. Temperature is similar to the Earth, basically.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[David Kipping]

Yeah. So they had the right distance for life.

[Joe Rogan]

This is it. Trappist1.

[David Kipping]

Yeah. And this is most astronomers favorite exoplanet system. The 7. It's a really dim star. The star is about eight times less massive than the sun. And so it's a really diminutive star. It's very red because it's so cool. And so the planets are actually packed in really close in. I think all seven planets are closer in than Mercury is around the same sun or seven of them. So you know, like the. They're kind of the same sort of distance that the moon is from us. So if there's an alien civilization here, they could like hop from planet to planet, like no problem. Be super easy. If I even like, if there was life on one of these planets, it would almost certainly just spread out between the planets by rocks just being knocked off from between them.

[Joe Rogan]

How far away is this?

[David Kipping]

Approximately about 30 light years, which is actually. Yeah, pretty close. That's actually really close by astronomy standards. Yeah. So this is a very nearby favorite object. James Webb is spending a lot of time looking at this thing. And planet E right in the middle there. That is, we think the most Earth like planet of the bunch in terms of its like the perfect distance really.

[Joe Rogan]

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[David Kipping]

And so there's a huge amount of attention to try and figure out. Does that have an atmosphere? And does that atmosphere maybe have oxygen? Does it have molecules that we have in our planet?

[Joe Rogan]

But we can't tell that yet with the tools we have. Like, it's too. Still too far.

[David Kipping]

So far, what we can tell is, is that planet B and C do not have atmospheres. That's something that James Webb has told us. So in the last year, we've discovered that the inner two planets are so close to the star that the atmosphere must have been removed somehow. It's probably, like, been stripped off from the stellar. From the stellar activity.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow. So almost like burned away.

[David Kipping]

Yeah. So the question is, what's D like? D, there's some ambiguity. We need a bit more data. And E, we're collecting that data right now.

[Joe Rogan]

So we. Have we even been able to tell, like, oh, there, there's water there, or still.

[David Kipping]

No, no. We don't even know if there's an atmosphere there at this point. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Now how do you collect that data then? Like you say, we're collecting that data now.

[David Kipping]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

What are they doing?

[David Kipping]

It's mostly. It's a lot of transit work, actually. So that same technique of how we detect the planet. Imagine you do that same observation. You see the dip in light of starlight. Now you repeat that observation. Let's say we were imagining the Earth transit the sun, and we do it in the blue wavelengths of light, and we do it in the red wavelengths of light. Now, what color is the sky?

[Joe Rogan]

Well, to me, it's blue.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, it's blue sky. And that's because our atmosphere.

[Joe Rogan]

I was waiting for a trick question there. I'm like, to me, that shit's blue.

[David Kipping]

A plus. Okay, we get. We have a blue sky because the molecules in our atmosphere scatter blue light. So if we didn't have an atmosphere, obviously that wouldn't happen. The sky just looked black. You wouldn't have any of that. So if an alien was watching the Earth transit the sun and they did it in the blue wavelength, the. You can kind of think of the atmosphere as being, like, opaque. Like, it would block out all the blue light, so all the blue light wouldn't be able to travel through the atmosphere. It gets stopped by our atmosphere and that and bounces around. That's what makes it look blue. So therefore, the planet is effectively a bit bigger. Bigger because it's the rock plus the atmosphere, so that's its size. Whereas in the red wavelengths of light, when you see a sunset, the red light just goes straight through, no problem. So red just travels straight through the atmosphere, and it will come out the other end, no problem. So the red light, the. The atmosphere is not there. Essentially, it's just the rock by itself. So you would see a bigger planet in blue wavelengths and a smaller planet in red wavelengths. And you can break that down into more fine colors. You know, you could look at individual wavelengths of light. And carbon dioxide, for example, absorbs at exactly 4.6 microns, I think it is. And it makes the plant look huge. So you're looking at all these wavelengths, like 4.0, 4.1, 4.2. It's just the same size. Same size, same size. And then you go to 4.6, and suddenly the plant looks bigger and you're like, oh, like it's got carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, because that's the thing that absorbs that wavelength. So that's how we can tell. Like, we see the plants get bigger, basically, at the wavelengths of light where certain molecules absorb.

[Joe Rogan]

Whoa.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, it's pretty clever.

[Joe Rogan]

It all. And it all comes back.

[David Kipping]

We can smell. We can smell the atmosphere.

[Joe Rogan]

We can smell it.

[David Kipping]

That's what we're doing, right? Wait, wait, now you're losing me. Not literally, but. Okay. We are kind of figuring out the chemical composition. It's like a sniffer scope. You're seeing the light break down. You can figure out the chemical was. It is essentially, you know, it's using the sense of smell. Maybe it's not a good analogy. That's the way I think about it.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, you got to watch it, because I'll start believing you.

[David Kipping]

Like, yeah, we can smell that. I think the future in Futurama, like, he actually builds a sniffer scope in the show where he thinks nostrils. He's got a giant scope.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, they say art imitates life, life imitates art, so you never know. But what. So when you. You have this whole. Whole Cool, Cool Worlds program over at Columbia that you've been doing, you also have an amazing YouTube channel where you bring it to the public as well. But like what's your process? Like do you walk in there and say, all right, let's find an exoplanet today or is it more, way more targeted than that? And like trying to look at the exoplanets you already know that then allows you to find other exoplanets some way through that.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, I mean different groups have different goals and aspirations and it really comes down to the individual leaders of these teams. For me, I'm not that interested in just discovering more planets. I'm kind of done with that a little bit. Like, okay, we've got 6,000, we've got 6,000 of the damn things. Like we don't need anymore. Like we've seen a bunch of planets at this point. So for me, I always want to do something new. Like it has to be something that's never been done before. That's pushing the envelope. So for me one of my big challenges has been to look for exomoons so moons around those planets. That's no, we have no confirmed exomoons whatsoever. 00. I found two candidates using the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb and the Kepler space Telescope. So we have two candidate objects and we are trying to get more data from James Webb to try and find even more and confirm the ones that we have. So what makes them candidates? Because we just have one dip. So you know I talked about earlier, like with these dips of light, you want to see like repeated dips, right? And then you're like okay, that's real. But if it's a one off, like you never know know, like it could just be something weird with it. Maybe someone shook the telescope that day or something went wrong, something electronic defect or something. So you just want to make sure that it's real and examines would be pretty cool to find they could be habitable in their own right. Like Pandora and avatars like that, right? You got all these blue aliens running around on the moon. So they could be like a huge fraction of alien. Maybe like most aliens live on moons and they look at the earth and like there's no point looking there because that's not a moon moon. Right. They just think that planets are boring places to look at. Our own moon actually is probably super influential for the earth being habitable. Some people say if you took away the moon we wouldn't be here. It stabilizes our axis. So if you took away the moon, the axial tilt is about 23 degrees but it would wander, it would drift and so there'd Be some times where the north pole was just pointing straight at the sun. And so the South Pole just totally. The Southern hemisphere just totally frees up out.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[David Kipping]

Several months of the year.

[Joe Rogan]

Wouldn't we also have like, massive tide problems and stuff too, without the moon?

[David Kipping]

Well, you'd have less tides. Without the moon, you'd have, you know, fewer tides. So. But actually, tides are thought to be good thing for life as well. One of the theories of the origins of life is like rock pools, basically. So if you go to a beach and you see a rock pool, the chemicals get kind of concentrated in these little pools. And when the moon first formed, it was way closer. It was have been like about 30, 40 times larger in the sky. It was really close. And it would have raised. It would have made tides that were so big, the entire continent would have been covered.

[Joe Rogan]

That's what I'm saying. And like Bruce Almighty, when he's like.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, it would have been like this.

[Joe Rogan]

And then it's like flooding. The whole.

[David Kipping]

The whole planet would have been flooded, basically. And that would have happened every day. And so that. Well, it's maybe. Maybe not good for building a house, but actually kind of good for getting things going for life because you can have loads of these rocks, rock pools covering entire content.

[Joe Rogan]

I should try that.

[David Kipping]

I don't want to try that. But unfortunately we don't have the ability to try that anyway, so that could be useful. And then, you know, the third reason is we want to one day actually take a photo of another Earth. I talked about this telescope before, the Habitual Worlds Observatory that we'd love to build if we could with NASA. We're doing some of the early calculations now about what that would look like. Maybe you can Google pale blue dot for me.

[Joe Rogan]

Pale blue dot, yeah.

[David Kipping]

This is a famous photo of the Earth, actually.

[Joe Rogan]

So you're talking directly with NASA. NASA about that?

[David Kipping]

Well, not me. I mean, I'm one of many astronomers. Yeah, it's not like, hey, NASA. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

You don't have David Kipping here.

[David Kipping]

Start building.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, okay.

[David Kipping]

Yes, sir. We'll get out right away.

[Joe Rogan]

Keep doing podcasts.

[David Kipping]

So, yeah, if you look at like, maybe the BBC image is kind of a cool one. So that is a photo of the Earth taken by. I think it was the one of the Voyager spacecrafts that took this image. And Carl Sagan asked the vehicle to turn around and take a photo of the Earth. So this is taken from, I think, where Neptune is from the distance of Neptune. Oh, wow. Yeah, really far out. And obviously the Earth is Just like basically a single pixel of just this smudgy blue thing. And that's kind of the image we're probably going to get one day of an exoplanet as we build these telescopes. So we'll hopefully get an image like that of another Earth like planet, far from its star. But where's the moon in that image? Image?

[Joe Rogan]

You can't see it.

[David Kipping]

It's just smushed in there. Too small. Yeah. And so one of the reasons we want to look for these moons is because we need to know if that moon's in there or not, because it makes a big difference to all this chemistry stuff I was talking about. So one of the possible signatures of life is oxygen that we talked about. But oxygen can also be made without life. Water makes oxygen actually, quite easily because it is made of oxygen. So if you just split hydrogen up and oxygen, you get. You get oxygen in the atmosphere. So that can happen. It's called photolysis. So people say oxygen's not enough. You need both oxygen plus something else. And methane is usually the other molecule that people talk about. Now Titan is a moon of Saturn that has tons of methane. So if the Earth didn't have life, it. It might still form oxygen through this photolysis, a small amount. And if it had a Titan like moon, it would have methane. And so you'd look at this blob and you'd see, oh, it's got oxygen, it's got methane. Boom, we're done. It's got life. But actually, it could be a lifeless world. So if you didn't know the moon was there, the moon could trick you into thinking you detected life when there isn't really life. So if we ever want to understand these images properly, we have to know if there's a moon there or not. So that's one of the other big reasons I think this is really cool, to try and figure out the moon population in the universe.

[Joe Rogan]

What's like the effect, though, when plants have multiple moons? Like we have one here, but, like, if you ran. I'm making some up if you're a planet, but if you even ran into an exoplanet somewhere else, so not just within our solar system, like, you know, when you see 1 with 4, what effect is that having on life? Or is there even a way to. Could it be multiple possibilities?

[David Kipping]

Depends what the moons are doing, what their orbits look like. Yeah. So the, the moons of Jupiter, since there's. There's four big moons of Jupiter, so they're the Galilean moons. And they do really wild stuff between them. So IO's like super volcanic. And the reason is because it's like a rock stuck between a hard place. It's got these three moons on the outside which are kind of tugging it out. And it's got Jupiter on the inside, which is tugging it in. So it's just being like, pulled each way and it kind of distorts and stretches the rock. And that actually causes all this volcanism on the surface of the moon. It also. These moons don't stay in the same place. They move. So our own moon is moving away from us about one inch per year. So, you know, in principle, you could lose moons eventually if billions of years. Yes. I said the moon used to be a lot closer. And that's the speed it's moving out.

[Joe Rogan]

But I feel like we could make that up somehow with tech. Like, yank it back a little bit. Moves 10 inches.

[David Kipping]

It's a lot of mass. It's big.

[Joe Rogan]

It's a lot of mass.

[David Kipping]

Yeah. A lot of energy to do that. It doesn't really affect us in any. Actually. The cool thing is we did. Well, it's not cool, but we'd eventually lose solar eclipse. As you know, the moon is like the. Basically the perfect size to block out the sun. As it gets further away, it will get smaller in a projected sense. And so eventually you won't get solar eclipses anymore. It's kind of weird. This is like one of those simulation things. It's kind of weird that we even have a moon which happens to be exactly the same size as the sun in terms.

[Joe Rogan]

Almost like they lined it up perfectly.

[David Kipping]

I know. And not only. Not only the same size, but. Yeah. That they're in the same plane to allow for those eclipses. This is why the Earth would be like the alien Taurus hotspot, in my opinion. Right. There's probably. There's probably very few planets in the universe where you could see a perfect solar eclipse. We are probably. And they would surely know that. They would surely be able to look at the. You know, if they could. An alien had this image of us. They'd be. To figure out the moon. Be to figure out the planet. Get the geometry. Like, holy. These guys get solar eclipse is. This is why. I don't. This is why the Fermi paradox is actually, to me, such a strange thing. Like there's. I'm sure an alien would look at the Earth and be like, damn, that is. There's stuff going on.

[Joe Rogan]

Right. So you're not one of these people. It's like, ah, they'd be like, that's not interesting at all. You think the opposite?

[David Kipping]

Oh no, no, I think, I mean from everything we know, I mean about exoplanets, is that the, the solar system is not normal. Even having a Jupiter sized planet is weird. Only 10 of stars have a Jupiter sized planet. We've got two of the damn things.

[Joe Rogan]

But we also only know, and I say only just looking at it in the full context of like the universe. We only know of 5,000 to 6,000 exoplanets and x number or whatever it is of solar systems. And yet you know, the universe, the known universe you said that exists within what we can tell by light could just be one little marble ball from that Men in Black, you know, last scene where it's a marble inside of a marble inside of a marble and someone playing with it. And hypothetically that could mean that there are quadrillion trillion billion gazillion, you know, planets like this that exist out on the planes. So maybe if you're an advanced civilization that I don't know has figured out some way to be able to see into other parts of the universe at any given time you might have a gazillion types of Earth to choose from. Even if based on what we know right now, which seem seems to be a lot, is like, wow, we can't find anything like Earth.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, I mean if you, you can, if you imagine aliens being basically able to do magic, you know, they're so sophisticated they can do stuff we can't possibly contemplate, then all bets are off. Right. It's really hard for us to speculate about either their interests, their activities, the way they think about the universe, how special a rare anything is for those guys. Like all bets are up, off. So I, I don't even worry about that too much to frankly, I mean another. This is Arthur C. Clark. Arthur C. Clark said any sufficiently advanced technologies indistinguishable from magic. There's another sci fi artist, a sci fi writer called Carl Schroeder, who is a modern guy and he took a twist on that and he said any sufficiently advanced aliens is indistinguishable from nature. From nature, yeah. So let's take a. The galaxy. We see the galaxy and we just assume it's natural. We think we ended. We can kind of come up with a story of how it was made and makes sense to us. But it is possible that that's just an alien made that. Right? We don't know that there's no we can't prove the. The Milky Way is not an industrial project. That's right. Of another civilization that's just so far beyond us. We think it's natural because we can't even contemplate like the possibility of someone that advanced being able to do those things. Maybe all stars are engineered products. Right. We think a star is a natural thing. Who knows if that's true or not. So all of our astrophysics is kind of based on the assumption of. I mean, all of science is based on the assumption of naturalism. That's kind of a fundamental tenet to science is that the universe is natural. And it's our job to try to come up with a natural explanation for why everything happens. A mechanistic. And that's worked really well for us. Through that naturalistic view of the universe, we can predict how a semiconductor will act if you give it a charge. And that allows you to have an iPhone and that allows you to build computers and have airplanes. And all of. All society and technology is basically built on this assumption. But when you try and extrapolate that to the whole universe, it is hard. We have to kind of operate in that assumption. But it's unproven, it's unfounded. So I am open minded to that possibility, but it doesn't really have much utility to assign to because what am I supposed to do with that? Like, it's fun to philosophically play with, but it's probably not a useful starting point for trying to like make predictions because who knows what, what these creatures would do.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. And, and I've heard some of the scientists obviously argue on, on with, with the Fermi paradox where it's like, it'd be uninteresting. It's just you don't even, you can't even conceive how an advanced civilization, regardless of how advanced they are, would even think. Think or what their, you know, utopian worldview, whatever that is, could be. So it is weird to think about, but there are, to your point, so many perfect things that line up in our, in our little area of the universe that you have to wonder, like what did create that? If it is more along. What was the name of that scientist again who came up with the nature indistinguishable from.

[David Kipping]

Oh, that's what. That's Carl Schroeder. So. Schroeder. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

So if it's along Schroeder's lines and then potentially nature was created by some form of man, so, you know, some form of alien somewhere else. Okay. Or you Know, you can get to the question of like, there has to be a creator on top of something like this because everything's so perfect and so aligned, not just in our area, but everything we're looking to solve in the universe is based on math and light and, you know, the senses coming together in weird ways. What's your opinion on that? Do you talk about where it all comes from?

[David Kipping]

Yeah, this is coming into an idea of like fine tuning as well a little bit. So yeah, you can. It's not just the conditions of our planet, but even the conditions of the universe. Yeah. Seem well, well constructed for life. The, you know, if you make a good example is the mass of the proton, the neutron. The mass of the neutron is a little bit heavier than the proton, but only by about 0.14% I think it is, and that's suspiciously close. If it was 0.3% or higher, basically you wouldn't be able to have atoms. The atomic nuclei would be unstable, they would immediately decay. And if it was either way around and protons were heavier, then protons would decay into neutrons and then you wouldn't be able to have any atoms that way either. So there's like this very narrow corridor of basically between 0 and 0.2% that those have to be balanced within. And it's perfect. And it's not just that those two numbers, there's like a bunch of numbers like that in the universe that seem really finely to you. So there's a few different ways of answering that, but the two very common ways are, yeah, you have to invoke a creator or something, or say simulated universe or a God or something created this. And that's why it seems that way. The other hypothesis is that you could say there's a multiverse. There's countless numbers of universes out there and most of them have arbitrary values of these numbers. And we don't live in any of those because of course, course we don't. There's no one in there. There's no atoms in those universes.

[Joe Rogan]

So what do you mean arbitrary values of those numbers?

[David Kipping]

So let's make the mass of the electron, you know, three times heavier than it is in other universe, and it.

[Joe Rogan]

Works in another multiverse.

[David Kipping]

Well, you could just choose those numbers to be whatever you want. Right. Especially I mean, if you, if you believe, buy into string theory. String theory comes up with, you know, 10 to the 80 different universes that are possible. And each of them have different rules of physics, different constants, and all of them are real solution to string theory. So it's possible there are many, many different universes out there with different values, and those would never have creatures in them. They would never have life in them. And so maybe some of them do. Maybe there's some, like, weird combinations of things that we hadn't anticipated, where you actually do get aliens. But we shouldn't be surprised to live in a universe where things seem finely tuned, because it would be impossible for us to live in a universe where that was not. So. Yes, so it's kind of like a chicken and egg type situation, like a catch 22, like you start to sort of eat your own tail in this logic. But it is fascinating and lots of cosmologists are deeply interested in this, in this problem. And it seems, and there are some credible reasons to believe in a multiverse as well, that that could maybe give us some credence.

[Joe Rogan]

What are, what are some of. Besides what you were just going through right there, what are, what are some of the most credible reasons you're seeing right now? Because I, I've had Brian Keating sitting here, who was a couple times, who was working on a project for 15 years to basically prove that the universe, if they were able to prove it was inflationary, which would. The way he explained it scientifically, you would know better than me, basically would say that means, yes, we have a multiverse. Turned out he was looking at universal dust and not what they were looking for. So they couldn't prove that. But, like, what kinds of things could point to us having the different transistor radios?

[David Kipping]

Yeah, I mean, I would say the same thing, more or less as what Brian, you know, would have told you that the theory of inflation is the theory. It's kind of almost the theory of the Big Bang. It's like what happened in the earliest stages of the universe. How did we get this extreme rapid expansion phase of the universe? And we believe, we believe if you don't have inflation, you can't really explain so many things about, about the light that we see from all directions in the universe. This is called the cmb, the cosmic microwave background. So we see light from all directions. It's the leftover radiation from this earliest period, the Big Bang itself, essentially. And what you notice is that it's the same temperature in all directions, and there are some correlations embedded within those that are very weak but are detectable. And they imply that somehow one region of space on this side of the universe and one region of space over that side of the universe were in contact, contact with each other. And when you look at the rate of expansion of the universe, that shouldn't happen. They should never have been in contact with each other. There's no way for light to have possibly have had time, given the age of the universe, to have gone from here to here, even if you reverse the clock. So the solution to that is inflation. Inflation says, look, I have a way of explaining that there was a period where the universe was expanding faster than speed alike, super fast. And then everything can kind of come back into causal contact. You could also try other things like changing the speed of light. You could say maybe the speed of light was faster, faster in the early universe than it is today. And that would be a way of making these things have contact with each other as well. But that comes with lots of other problems and generally it's not as favored as inflation. So inflation has a few different predictions and one of them that Brian was looking for was these gravitational waves that would be left over from the Big Bang as well. So we definitely have quite a bit of evidence for inflation at this point. And there's many different theories of inflation. There's not just one, but in almost all of them you end up with a multiverse. So a multiverse is just very difficult to avoid in inflationary theories. And it asks an interesting philosophical question as to whether this is science or not, to be honest. Because by definition a universe outside of our universe can't ever be testable. Right. And science is all about evidence, testing. I want to hear, in our universe, right? Yeah. No one in our universe could ever detect the presence of another universe. Universe. But because the universe is supposed to be everything, right? So, yeah, you can't possibly leave your universe as far as we know. And so the question is, then is another, is the concept of another universe even truly science anymore? Like what are we talking about?

[Joe Rogan]

Interesting. I've never heard that argument.

[David Kipping]

Okay.

[Joe Rogan]

I mean, it makes sense what you're saying.

[David Kipping]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

But I don't know, I'm getting a little Philip K. Dick now if we start talking about this. But you've, I'm sure you're familiar with at least some of his work and stuff. He's, he's a legend from the sci fi space days. But in, I'm thinking of like the one example, the man in the High Castle, which they later made a TV show as well. The way that they were bending time, their time traveling was they were traveling between dimensions, which would mean someone from this dimension, if you were ever able to figure out how to do this, was going into another dimension to observe and test things in that dimension. In that case, if you are coming from the dimension we're in, to go in and you're actually were able to figure out a way, way to go in, tap into the other dimension to study something, does that then constitute science because we're coming from the place where science exists.

[David Kipping]

Yeah. If you could interact, if you could traverse or interact with them, then I think you could do experiments and test it and prove it. And it's, it's important to be clear. There's many different definitions of multiverse. So we already talked about one earlier on the show with this hut stuff of like, that's like a multiverse. Right. The many worlds hypothesis says in a quantum sense there's another universe we right here in this room that's almost like slightly offset from us. It's decohered from us and therefore we can't interact with it. But it is literally in the same space and time as us. This multiverse is different. This is like saying if you travel in a spaceship just forever and ever and ever, you just keep going, keep going. You'll eventually reach regions of space where the laws of physics could be different. And that's still in a sense part of the infinite universe, but in another sense it's, it's a completely different, different pocket universe or to its own. And then inflation says you can't, there's another type of multiverse beyond that. You can't even leave this bubble if you, you could just travel forever. There's infinite space inside each bubble, but there's also an infinite number of bubbles. So this is where it gets really trippy. There's an infinite number of universes, each with infinite amount of space within each of them. So that really is like the marbles from Men in Black and those, you know that, that some of them will be identical to us, which is really wild because there's infinities involved. There'll be, there'll be an infinite number of all of us having this conversation.

[Joe Rogan]

It's like a small butterfly effect across each.

[David Kipping]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Transistor motion.

[David Kipping]

Yeah. So ones would be some maybe wearing a red T shirt. In some of them. Yeah, that's the only difference. But in other ones it would just be almost identical. And so this is where science starts to get a bit, bit philosophical, a bit metaphysical. And there are legitimate questions. Some cosmologists and physicists strongly feel like this is just pseudoscience. This is not legitimate. But inflation is definitely not pseudoscience. It explains a ton of observations. It's Real, it's credible. It makes predictions that were confirmed, real predictions that have been confirmed, like super horizons scales in the cmb, for instance. So there's a ton of stuff it's predicted.

[Joe Rogan]

Super horizon scales in the C. Yeah.

[David Kipping]

That'S these kind of like these points being in contact with each other that shouldn't be able to be in contact with each other. So you should. When they looked at the power spectrum of the cmb, that's sort of asking like, yeah, does this, does the temperature of this have any correlation to the temperature of this part over here? They Inflation predicted if it was right and it was actually predicted to explain different problems. It was invoked to explain why we don't have magnetic monopoles. But that's a different story. So that was why it was invented. And then one of the predictions of the theory was that you should find, once we get the technology to, to assess this, that parts of the universe that are so far apart from each other that shouldn't be in contact with each other will appear to have been in contact with each other. And that was then confirmed later on. So that was a real prediction of the theory. And an inevitable consequence, more or less an inevitable consequence of inflation is this multiverse. So what do you do when you have a theory where much of it is scientific and credible, but of all of the predictions it makes, it happens to make one extra one which is totally untestable, but is perhaps the most philosophically intriguing one of them.

[Joe Rogan]

Untestable in what we know now, but eventually possibly testable.

[David Kipping]

Yes. I mean, this is where you get to kind of. Yeah. Invoke magic. Invoke miracles. Yeah. I, I tried to avoid invoking miracles because. Yeah, that's part of science is let's, let's think about what is, you know, the bounds of what is known. But it's a pretty slippery slope, in my opinion, to invoke miracles and magic because then just sort of everything goes and then. Yeah, there isn't any science left at that point. Like you just say you may have been literally in a Tolkien world of Lord of the Rings at that point. Yes, yes.

[Joe Rogan]

And I like, I think about this one a lot just because it's, it is so theoretical and it's so trippy and it can tie together a whole bunch of ideas. Like you mentioned simulation theory, theory and all that. But it's like, what if you die in this dimension and you're spawned into another dimension from that, but it's only a year before you died or 10 years before you died? In another one or 30 years before you died, or you're in a different set of circumstances, you were married to some girl in this one, you're married to a different girl on that one. It gets so weird. And I can imagine in the scientific community when you have now taken like thread on a thread on a thread on a thread, they're like, wait, it was. Wait, slow down, stop. Because if one threads wrong, the whole house of cards, like, we're here and it doesn't even make. You're a Terence Howard. Like, you know, you just went way far beyond where it was actually, like provable or feasible.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, it's, it's a, it's always hard as a scientist because you're, you're walking this fine edge between pushing the boundaries of knowledge and being open minded to wild and speculative ideas. But at the same time, like, the whole point of science is to have stuff which you can prove and show is absolutely right and doesn't mean the other things are wrong, that it's not exclusionary in that sense. Sometimes it excludes things, but mostly we just want to know what is right and how the world works. To have rules that we can use in our lives. Right. To use and to build stuff.

[Joe Rogan]

Yes.

[David Kipping]

And to explore the universe.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. And I think like, the way we label things also can rule out like, I don't know, almost create attitudes on how we view things. We were talking about it with laser labeling, you know, Three Eye Atlas as potentially alien. Get some scientists to be like, shut the up. But like, even when you say a word like alien and think about what that is in our head, we think, all right, green man and spacesuit coming here in ufo. But then, you know, what is the actual definition? Does it have to do with place, space and time? Meaning? I've always looked at the movie Interstellar and I look at Matthew McConaughey and he leaves this Earth at a given time at, you know, age 40 something. He's, I think he's gone for two years total. He comes back 85, 90 years later.

[David Kipping]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

He is only age two years. And the place he comes back to, which actually technically wasn't Earth, but let's assume it was literally Earth he came to. The people who were there are some of the same people he left, but they're in a completely different part of life and is a completely different reality than the, the lived time that he left and came back to. So I look at Matthew McConaughey and I go, that's an alien.

[David Kipping]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

You know what I Mean, he's from a different. A different period at different times. So to the planet he's on, he's an alien. So when people start generalizing and saying, like, it has to be something from light years away, that's like a person or, you know, a green man or whatever, it's like, well, who's to say that there's not something that's been. Been figured out in humanity to say, oh, there could be, you know, some sort of future human or past human element that has figured out how to bend time? Like, is that crazy to think about, or am I also way too far in that theoretical?

[David Kipping]

Yeah, I think certainly being a cultural alien is 100% right. Like, that's true. Like, you could definitely be. You travel to Japan, you feel like an alien. Like you're just walking around. You just. It's so different. And I'm sure they feel the same way when they first come over here. But the. The time travel thing's interesting. So, yeah, I. I think forwards time travel is obviously trivially possible. And that's what Matthew McConaugh does. He travels forwards through time 90 years to go backwards. That doesn't happen in that movie. And that's because Kip Thorne was one of the science directors behind that film. And he. He knows. He knows his stuff. And it. That should not. That caused a lot of problems to physics, if that's possible. So a good example, actually, is wormholes. People often talk about wormholes as a possible way of going backwards through time. Even if you created two wormholes right here, like a. Well, one wormhole, but two mouths. You could always put one mouth on a spaceship, travel super fast, close to the speed of light, then come back and you'd offset them in time. So now you have a time travel machine. Okay, sounds good, but there's a problem here. So now you can have a particle, and this is something Stephen Hawking imagined. You can have a random particle, like a virtual particle, even though it pops up and it travels through the. One of the tunnels, like say A and comes out in the past into B, and then it over overtakes itself. So now at this point in space between these two mouths, I have a duplicate, a clone to Matthew McConaughey's. And then those two now go through the mouth, and now there's four, and now there's eight, and now that's 16. And it just keeps going. And because. Because this in, you know, this is. There's an infinite number of loops that can happen, you would end up with infinite amounts of energy in between the two. Even though there's only one particle, that one particle has now turned into an infinite amount of energy in between the two wormholes. And an infinite amount of energy. Well, it doesn't have to be infinite, but a large amount of energy will destabilize the wormhole. So the idea is that Stephen Hawking said this. It's kind of like putting a microphone to a loudspeaker speaker. You get, like, a feedback that sound. The same thing happens with the two wormholes with these virtual particles. You get a feedback of this particle, and so that. That loud sound becomes an infinite amount of gravity, basically, that rips apart the. The two wormholes. So the moment you build a time machine, in this case these two wormholes, it immediately destroys itself. Like, the very second you activate it, it destroys itself. And so Stephen Hawking suggested. He gave the example there of the two wormholes, but he suggested this was a general rule, that whenever you build any time machine, the moment you turn it on, one of these effects will be ruinous. The universe just won't allow it to happen, because if it did, it would kind of break the universe. And it's true. Like, if you're. If. If the universe was a simulation, you wouldn't want time travel to be allowed in that simulation because. Because it would be. If you're running the simulation real time now, you have to have a time machine in your real world to be able to account for the fact people are doing time loops in your simulation. And maybe that's not forbidden in their universe either. It would also allow for infinite amounts of memory for the same reason. Right? Because now you could have two mathematics, four mathematics. So now you have to have an infinite amount of memory on the computer to handle the infinite versions of events that can happen. So it would very quickly destroy the computation, the memory, and even maybe the logic of their own universe that they operate in. So there's good reasons why if you were designing a universe, you would not want that to happen. And then, of course, you can have paradoxes, like grandfather paradox, we can kill your granddad or something. They just have no logical solution. So, like, how is the simulation supposed to proceed past that point?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, that was all. That was a. That was a point Michio Kaku made with, like, hypothetical time travel and stuff. He's like, if you went back to April 14, 1865, to try to stop John Wil's booth, you're not stopping it in this multiverse. You're. You're creating a new reality that's well.

[David Kipping]

Maybe we don't know that.

[Joe Rogan]

We don't know. But you're saying that the exact.

[David Kipping]

That's one resolution. That's one resolution. The problem with that is now. Yeah. Now you have to create another whole universe. So now every time someone uses a time machine, it creates another universe. Right. And what's that? Because that's not an Everettian multiverse. That's not an inflationary multiverse. That's not a, a infinite space. It's a different as another type of multiverse that you've just invented to explain this to accommodate a time machine. So there's. Yeah. You have to have a lot of miracles work again. It's like how many miracles you need before breakfast to accept something being true. So I think for my money. Yeah. I think time machines run into so many problems. Reverse time machines, they're probably not possible. Forward time machines, no problem. But going back, changing things in the past I think is probably prohibited, unfortunately.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Time travel is one of those ones I would talk about all day. We would stay on that a long time because there's so many possibilities.

[David Kipping]

Go back to the start of this podcast.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, exactly, exactly. We'll go back. You can do it all over again. But one other thing I did want to talk to you about before you got out of here is this leaked memo that just happened with NASA for Project Athena. Have you seen this? Okay, deep. Can we pull this up? So the broad strokes are I, I think a guy who's. His name's Jarrick Jared Isaac man.

[David Kipping]

He's like, oh yeah, he's the, he's going to be the. Hopefully the next NASA administration.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. The head of NASA.

[David Kipping]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

So this memo leaks where he's talking about how essentially, and I'm really broad brushing it here, they're going to create a more like incentivize the private industry to come in and basically work more hand in hand and get budget that way. Meaning like some of the private people like Elon Musk who have a trillion. Are going to have a trillion dollars, could start contributing more without the government necessarily like creating a way bigger NASA. So you've mentioned today, this is why I bring it up like that you have obviously had discussions with NASA and like it's something you care about and you've been around it like what needs to change there? I'm not saying this is the solution, but like what is the future here with the relationship between NASA, which is a government entity and like the private people like the Elons and the Bezos and the SpaceX is obviously owned, owned by Elon, who are trying to run their own missions to get to frontiers in space.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, there's a lot of overlapping interests and reasons for collaboration optimism there, I think. Yeah, NASA, I mean, a lot of people think NASA builds rockets, but it doesn't. I mean, it's always contracted out people like Lockheed Martin to build its rockets and other companies. So it's not like it's contracting out. SpaceX is some novel thing. It's always done that NASA is the contractor. They solicit the contracts and find the best vendor to deliver these services. So if the private industry can pull down those costs, costs for whatever service it is, then I'm 100 in favor of that. I think the, the only anomaly here is this question of science, science funding. If you're doing fundamental science, like the origins of the universe, something like that, and you want a private investor to do that, you say, oh, it's okay, the private industry will, will solve the problem of the origin of the universe. They're not going to do that. There's like, there's no economic incentive, there's no possible investment you can imagine in a human lifetime that would give a positive return on your investment. That it had to have to be philanthropy. That's the only reason you would do it. Maybe if we lived for thousands and thousands of years to come back to, you know, extended lifetime, maybe then we'd give a. Because then we'd be like, well, in thousands of years we'll be traveling the universe, so then we actually need to know this. But, and that's the whole point of science. Science is multi generational. It's not all about answers that are going to solve problems. When all the discoveries of Maxwell's equations and quantum physics were being discovered in the 1920s, no one had any idea we'd be using that to build iPhones one day. That's radical. So it's very difficult in a human lifetime to predict how investments in fundamental science are going to reap rewards, but they always do. They always lead to profound shifts in society and technology as we, as we increase our knowledge and development. So I'm a little bit worried about that. Like if, if we said, if NASA said, or the government said, look, we're just going to let private industry do all the science, they would do a lot of science. There's still lots of science which is applicable in our everyday lives, like maybe, you know, healthcare stuff or vaccinations and drugs. You can imagine getting plenty of funding because that affects people In a day to day sense sense. But looking for exoplanets or trying to study another galaxy far away, that's just gonna fall off the wayside. That's not going to be funded by anyone. And I think I was having this conversation with a colleague the other day. Why do we do science? Fundamentally, I don't think it's that different from why we do art. Why do you play musical instrument? Why do you watch Interstellar? Why do you, why do people make movies? Some of it's to make money, but some of it's just the human condition of, of wanting to engage in these activities because they enrich our lives. They make. It'd be kind of a sad state of affairs if you just lived in a closed box room. You woke up, you ate food, you took a, and then you went to sleep and you woke up next day and you rinse, wash, pee, and everything about your life was just about pure survival, economic benefit. That was it. You know, picking up a guitar and playing that in the middle of that day would enrich your life so much more. Drawing a painting, contemplating the size of the universe, these are things we do not because they are beneficial to our survival. So often they are as well. But fundamentally I believe the reason why we do these things is because it's part of what makes us as being human beings, we're just animals. If we're not doing that, we may as well just live like a rat. There's not anything else to our existence. So yeah, I think it's sometimes hard for the private industry is so short term they care about the court. You know, the quarterly stock revenue and you know, the returns on the capital investments, all this kind of stuff that it's, it's difficult for me to imagine how private industry would invest in fundamental science. That's why government is the best place for it.

[Joe Rogan]

I'm thinking that there's gotta be some beautiful balance to strike there. You know, I, I, I agree with you. If you just pushed it all onto the private side, you know, you're, they're going to be tactically focused on the stuff that makes money right away and not in the discovery of it as well. But that also means government's got to take it seriously to be able to fund discovery of, of these things and not just, you know, obviously there's always a war to fight somewhere, so they're putting money towards that. But where, where do you make sure you keep that excitement you had for space that we had five, six decades ago, that we lost there for a While now we're starting to get it back. How do we keep that going? How do we keep the next generations trying to, trying to find like I love that point you make right there, like the art in space and, and the interest of it. And I do think a big part of it is having communicators like you go out onto the mics, talk to people, talk through these things that are happening. I think that's a huge help because somewhere a 15 year old kid's listening to this right now. He's never thought about it before. He's like, wow, this guy. It's really cool. I'm going to go look at this. And that's the power of the Internet, you know.

[David Kipping]

Yeah. I mean it's. Astronomy is a little bit like a gateway drug to science. Right. You, you, you get into Astro and you realize like, holy science is pretty freaking cool. And maybe you end up being an engineer or starting your own, you know, tech company or something. But sometimes that initial spark is just, is just the wonder of something really fundamental and deep and it leads to manifest other economic benefits down the road. But yeah, I think even without that, I'd still say let's do it because it's the same reason why I like playing my guitar is and reading books. It's like there's something think about being human that's about, that has to be curiosity driven and wonder. And I think life's pretty empty if you don't have those things.

[Joe Rogan]

Agreed. What have you been doing on this sabbatical for the last?

[David Kipping]

I'm trying to write a book, actually. Yeah? Yeah, so I'm working on a book. It's, it's questioning our place in the universe. Yeah. It's thinking about the case for alien life in the universe, the scale of the universe, historical examples of possible evidences like a 3 atlas will probably appear in there and mistakes we've made in those journeys in the past and lessons to be learned and perhaps even the case that the Earth might be more special than we realize.

[Joe Rogan]

When's this book coming out?

[David Kipping]

As soon as I write it, I guess.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh. So how far into it are you? Have you written any of it?

[David Kipping]

I've written about a third of it, so I've got, I've got a ways to go.

[Joe Rogan]

Okay. I feel like there's a few podcasts in there. There.

[David Kipping]

Yeah, for sure. Right down the road.

[Joe Rogan]

So you've been doing, you've been all over in the uk, like doing this and designing it.

[David Kipping]

That's nice. Yeah. And doing science as well, of course. And making the Cool Words videos and the pog, all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, anyone wants to find me, hit the head to Cool Worlds.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, we're gonna have your Cool Worlds link there. We'll also have any other social media linked as well, so let me know on that. Obviously, your. Your channel's great. You've done some amazing podcasts in the past with a bunch of different people, including Joe Roach Hogan and Lex Friedman. So it was great to have you in here, and thanks to Mark Gagnon for hooking this up.

[David Kipping]

Yeah. This is awesome. So much.

[Joe Rogan]

All right, enjoy the rest of your sabbatical and I will see you again soon, sir.

[David Kipping]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

All right, everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode. If you haven't already, please hit that subscribe button and smash that, like, button on the video. They're both a huge, huge help, and if you would like to follow me on Instagram and X, those links are in my description below.