Searching for life on other planets with astrophysicist Sara Seager

Summary

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Podcast Summary: ReThinking with Adam Grant

Episode: Searching for Life on Other Planets with Astrophysicist Sara Seager

Date: February 17, 2026
Host: Adam Grant
Guest: Sara Seager, Astrophysicist and Planetary Scientist at MIT

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into the search for life beyond Earth, as organizational psychologist and host Adam Grant engages in a wide-ranging, thought-provoking conversation with MIT astrophysicist Sara Seager. Together, they explore the science of exoplanet discovery, ponder the probability of extraterrestrial life, discuss the philosophical and practical implications of finding life elsewhere, and reflect on Seager’s distinctly unusual origin story. The episode also touches on scientific creativity, the value of “pure” research, and what motivates great thinkers to push the boundaries of the unknown.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Sara Seager's Origin Story & Perspective on Science

• Early Fascination:
  • As a child, Seager attended a “star party” with her father and remembers being awestruck by seeing the Moon through a telescope for the first time.
    • “The moon is literally a whole other world and I just thought, wow, what is out there? It’s so huge and vast and magnificent…” (01:01, Sara Seager)
• Formative Family Dynamics:
  • Grew up with an authoritarian stepfather, fostering a distrust of authority, and a whimsical, open-minded father, encouraging creative thinking:
    • “So what I got out of my childhood was... because of my stepfather, like, a distrust of authority and because of my dad openness to crazy ideas that I could think through on my own. And, wow, what a winning combination for science...” (02:49, Sara Seager)

2. The Science of Exoplanet Discovery

• Definitions & History
  • Exoplanets are planets that orbit stars other than the Sun.
  • The field is young; when Seager entered grad school in the 1990s, exoplanets were just being discovered.
    • “...everyone had thought that exoplanets would be like our solar system... And that's not what people found.... evidence just became incontrovertible that exoplanets are real and they're incredibly different from our solar system.” (05:02, Sara Seager)
• Detection Techniques
  • Most exoplanets are found by observing tiny dips in starlight as a planet passes in front of its star (“transiting”).
    • “...we don't spatially resolve those stars. They're just points of light. Yet we can measure the drop in brightness precisely enough to find evidence of planets orbiting their star.” (05:54, Sara Seager)
• AI & Planet Hunting
  • AI is currently assisting with data analysis and efficiency, but hasn’t yet revolutionized the search methods.
    • “For exoplanets, it's really done more of that first category, just done things that we can do better, faster... It hasn't really found like a new path, a new way to do things.” (07:00, Sara Seager)

3. The Scale of the Universe & Likelihood of Extraterrestrial Life

• Exoplanet Abundance
  • Estimates of “trillions” of exoplanets in our galaxy alone.
    • “Trillions. Trillions. In our galaxy alone. We have just scratched the surface.” (07:40, Sara Seager)
• Intelligent Life?
  • Surmising that intelligent life should exist somewhere, though biologists remain skeptical due to our ignorance of the origin of life mechanisms.
    • “Biologists don’t like this... because we don’t understand how life originated on Earth, and so we cannot assume that it originates elsewhere...” (08:42, Sara Seager)
  • Both agree: If life arose independently more than once, “the chance then is just so believable that it’s happening elsewhere.” (09:31, Sara Seager)
• Probability of Discovery
  • Seager’s personal estimate on finding intelligent life in our lifetimes is “pretty low... I might even put it at zero for now.” (10:35, Sara Seager)
    • The search focuses on nearby stars, where our capabilities allow.

4. What Would Discovery Mean for Humanity?

• Cosmic Perspective

  • Would shift our understanding of our place in the cosmos, continuing humanity’s historical “de-centering” from the universe.
    • “...it kind of carries us forward in this cosmic story of what is our place. How do we fit in?” (11:31, Sara Seager)
  • Everyday life likely would not change immediately.

• Timeline for Even Simple Life Detection

  • Non-intelligent (microbial) life detection is much more plausible soon.
    • “...we hope to have evidence for [simple life]... in our lifetime. Starting with our solar system, the subsurface of Mars... the clouds of Venus... the subsurface of one of Jupiter’s or Saturn’s icy moons...” (12:21, Sara Seager)
  • Exoplanet atmospheric analysis looks for “gases that don’t belong” as biosignatures.
    • “...we’re looking there for signs of life... gases that don't belong. Like here on Earth, we have oxygen... But without life... we'd have no oxygen...” (12:21, Sara Seager)

5. The Fermi Paradox and the “Ants” Analogy

• Fermi Paradox Explained
  • The tension between the high likelihood of life and complete lack of evidence.
• Possible Solutions
  • Technological or distance barriers could explain why we haven’t found (or been found by) extraterrestrials.
    • Seager’s favorite: "It’s like the ants. ...Would you talk to those ants? ...I actually like to think we're the ants. We are the ants to the super intelligent beings out there. And, like, why would they come here and talk to us?" (15:07, Sara Seager)
• Are We Being Observed?
  • “Maybe they're studying us. Just like if we study the ants, do they know we're studying them?” (16:12, Sara Seager)

6. Should We Be Making Contact?

• Debate in Astronomy
  • Ongoing vigorous debates among astronomers about sending Earth signals or messages.
    • “...that debate is actually an active one.” (17:15, Sara Seager)
• Seager’s View
  • "I don't think it matters... others could find us if they're there and if they have the technology..." (17:32, Sara Seager)
• First Contact
  • If the technology gap is narrow, discovery may take millennia either way.
  • Seager would make first contact if possible, but reiterates, “if they have the ability to come to us, then they already know we’re here.” (18:40, Sara Seager)

7. Why Search for Life (and Practice Pure Science) When We Have Earthbound Problems?

• STEM Inspiration
  • Astronomy excites & inspires, drawing future scientists into STEM, producing needed technologists and innovators.
    • “We communicate to the public the wonders of science... One of the main things is just to attract more people to Science, we need astronomy to show people how great it is.” (23:17, Sara Seager)
• Unexpected Payoffs
  • Pure research often leads to unpredictable, transformative innovations (e.g., GPS, lasers, medical imaging).
    • “You have a ton of stuff happening... That's why in astronomy we take credit for some medical imaging, because we had to translate our data to images.” (23:17, Sara Seager)
  • Adam Grant connects this to creative theory: “Idea generation requires a tremendous amount of variety. There's going to be a lot of noise and the challenge is to find the signal and then hone in on it.” (25:24, Adam Grant)

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On cosmic insignificance:
  • “So if that doesn’t make you feel insignificant, like, what does?” (08:28, Sara Seager)
• On humility in the face of the cosmos:
  • “We shouldn’t be so arrogant as to assume that we are alone in the universe.” (32:46, Adam Grant)
  • “It’s just self centered, really... I like that view because... confronting like our own tragedies against the vastness of the universe, it somehow brings comfort.” (33:00, Sara Seager)
• On advice for aspiring scientists:
  • Worst advice: “Don’t go into astrophysics. You’ll never make it.” (27:54, Sarah Seager)
  • Best advice she gives: “Hone your inner voice... try to develop that inner voice.” (28:06, Sarah Seager)
• On unexpected life:
  • “Yes. Right now it’s that there could be life... in the clouds of Venus... made of concentrated sulfuric acid that kills all of our life instantly.” (28:45, Sara Seager)
• On the motivation to keep searching:
  • “We just want to know what is out there, who might be out there.” (21:02, Sara Seager)

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Notable Segment Timestamps

• Sara’s origin story & childhood influences – 02:49
• What is an exoplanet & how are they detected? – 04:41 | 05:54
• The number and diversity of exoplanets – 07:40
• Probabilities and challenges in finding intelligent life – 10:35
• Cosmic implications of discovering life – 11:31
• Signs of microbial life & possible locations – 12:21
• Fermi Paradox and “ants” analogy – 15:07
• Risks & debates over making contact – 17:15
• Value of astronomy & public understanding – 23:14
• The case for pure science & unexpected innovation – 25:24
• Quick-fire advice and favorite space films – 27:44–29:58
• Concluding on humility, perspective, and coping – 33:00

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Episode Tone

The conversation is lively and deeply curious, blending scientific rigor with imagination, humility, and a sense of wonder. Both Adam Grant and Sara Seager demonstrate openness to bold ideas and a drive to push intellectual boundaries, balancing skepticism with awe at the scale and mystery of the universe.

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This summary captures the essence and flow of the episode, spotlighting scientific explanations, debate, and moments of personal reflection. Whether you're a space enthusiast, an aspiring scientist, or simply curious, it offers a thoughtful primer on the thrilling search for life across the cosmos.

Transcript

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[Sarah Seager]

When I was a small child, my dad took me to a star party. That's not like where the Hollywood stars are, but it's where amateur astronomers have their telescopes out. I remember clearly getting to see the moon through a telescope for the first time. It's absolutely astonishing. The moon is literally a whole other world and I just thought, wow, what is out there? It's so huge and vast and magnificent. You know, whatever's out there beyond Earth.

[Adam Grant]

Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking My Podcast with Ted on the science of what makes us Tick. I'm an organizational psychologist and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking. Sarah Seger is an astrophysicist and planetary scientist whose research focuses on exoplanets, planets outside our solar system, orbiting other stars. When we spoke, she was at mit, sitting in front of her chalkboard, which was covered in equations. Sarah, is that the Goodwill hunting chalkboard behind you?

[Sarah Seager]

Well, it is mit.

[Adam Grant]

It's on brand. What are those equations?

[Sarah Seager]

Well, these equations describe exoplanets that fortuitously are aligned in a way that they go in front of the star as seen from our viewpoint. And we call these transiting planets. And it's the main way we discover exoplanets today.

[Adam Grant]

Sarah's main research goal is to find another Earth, meaning a planet outside our solar system that could sustain life. We talked about how to detect exoplanets, the likelihood of finding alien life forms out there, and how her unique childhood circumstances led to her groundbreaking work. I have so many questions for you about this, but before we get there, take me back to your origin story. How did you end up in this field?

[Sarah Seager]

So, my origin story, I always loved the night sky. And, you know, coupled to that, I had a very quirky childhood. I lived with my mother and stepfather, and my stepfather was literally like a mean monster who mentally tortured me. And at the same time, I lived with my dad on weekends. And even though he was an educated man, he believed in crazy things. Like, he adored me so much. He told me he believed in reincarnation and that we would come back to this Earth together, like, again and again as, like, business partners or brothers or something. And so there I was, like, at 11 years old, going to the library, taking out a stack of books to kind of sort through this on my own. So what I got out of my childhood was because of my stepfather, like, a distrust of authority and because of my dad openness to crazy ideas that I could think through on my own. And, wow, what a winning combination for science because we have to be able to challenge authority and we have to entertain out their ideas and sort through what is possible.

[Adam Grant]

Wow. So how did that take you to searching for exoplanets?

[Sarah Seager]

Well, it sounds so cliche, and I don't know how I came to this, like, at such a young age, in my early 20s. But life is short, you know, and if you find something you're good at, that you love doing, you should go for it. So I decided to go to graduate school in astronomy. And when I was in graduate school in the mid-1990s, that's when exoplanets were first discovered. And my PhD thesis advisor, by the way, was his first student. And he also. He only told me this a couple of decades later. He didn't realize that you shouldn't be giving a graduate student, like, an incredibly risky project. But I guess neither of us knew any better, and we thought it was an amazing idea. So I jumped on the chance to work on these new exoplanets.

[Adam Grant]

So what is an exoplanet?

[Sarah Seager]

An exoplanet is a planet that orbits a star other than the sun, because in the night sky, all of those stars are suns. And if our sun has planets like Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, et cetera, it makes sense that other stars have planets also. And they do.

[Adam Grant]

We didn't know this with much confidence, though, when you first got into the field, did we?

[Sarah Seager]

Not at all. The evidence we had was that we can see stars being born, and around those stars, we see disks of leftover Stuff of gas and dust that we assumed formed planets. But when I first got into it, everyone had thought that exoplanets would be like our solar system, like small planets close to the star, with massive planets like Jupiter quite far from the star. And that's not what people found initially, because our selection biases. What's easier to find are big planets close to the star. So it's not only that not much was known about them, but what was known wasn't believed. And then, I mean, slowly the evidence grew, but not after a lot of, like, back and forth. And eventually the evidence just became incontrovertible that exoplanets are real and they're incredibly different from our solar system.

[Adam Grant]

How do you detect one?

[Sarah Seager]

There's so many ways to detect exoplanets. The most common one today is, is by watching star brightnesses as a function of time. So to oversimplify, it would be like taking your phone and pointing at a field in the night sky and just taking a picture over and over again, like for nights on end and years on end. And what we're looking for is a tiny drop in brightness because some planets, their orbits are aligned perfectly with our point of view. And so the planet goes in front of the star, as seen from our viewpoint. And repeatedly, every time it orbits its star, it goes in front of the star and there's a tiny, tiny drop in brightness. Like, what you have to understand is we don't spatially resolve those stars. They're just points of light. Yet we can measure the drop in brightness precisely enough to find evidence of planets orbiting their star. But it's a rare occurrence to align just so. And that's why we have to stare at the night sky and look at hundreds of thousands to millions of stars at one time.

[Adam Grant]

I can imagine then that AI has started to radically transform this detection process.

[Sarah Seager]

Like, yes and no. You know how there's two uses for AI? I'd say two uses in science. One is just to do our job better, so we can train AI with supervised learning or unsupervised learning, and just get it to do more uniform job more quickly. But the part about AI that we really want it to do is find something we humans couldn't do. So not just doing what we can do better, but putting things together in a new way. For exoplanets, it's really done more of that first category, just done things that we can do better, faster or more thoroughly or just more efficiently or with a tiny bit more insight. It hasn't really Found like a new path, a new way to do things.

[Adam Grant]

Do you have a sense of how many exoplanets might be out there?

[Sarah Seager]

Trillions. Trillions. In our galaxy alone. We have just scratched the surface. It's like we can meet our neighbors, but we can't meet the people on the other side of the globe. So literally every star appears to have a planetary system. And in our galaxy alone, there are hundreds of billions of stars. So, wow. I mean, if every star has multiple planets, that's more than hundreds of billions.

[Adam Grant]

I mean, that's just. That's a number at a scale that is almost impossible to grasp.

[Sarah Seager]

It is. It is almost impossible.

[Adam Grant]

I mean, it's. It's hard. I can't even picture a trillion of anything.

[Sarah Seager]

I know. Just think about that vast night sky. At the very darkest sky, if we had good eyesight, we could see only thousands of stars, and yet there are hundreds of billions out there in our galaxy alone. And hundreds of billions of galaxies.

[Adam Grant]

Incredible.

[Sarah Seager]

So if that doesn't make you feel insignificant, like, what does?

[Adam Grant]

Yeah, and I guess, you know, the other thing that makes really salient for me is it makes it seem so much more unlikely that there isn't intelligent life anywhere.

[Sarah Seager]

I agree, biologists don't like this, but, yes, the numbers just seem to tell you there has to be intelligent life somewhere out there.

[Adam Grant]

Why don't biologists like that?

[Sarah Seager]

Because we don't understand how life originated on Earth, and so we cannot assume that it originates elsewhere until we understand how it happens here.

[Adam Grant]

Okay, but the question of mechanism seems like a really different one than the question of probabilities, doesn't it?

[Sarah Seager]

Well, aren't they related? I mean, you have to know how something occurs in order to assess the probability of it occurring again.

[Adam Grant]

Fair. But, you know, I guess thinking about this as a social scientist, even not understanding the mechanisms, I think, what are the odds that, you know, we're talking one in a trillion times how many galaxies?

[Sarah Seager]

Well, I'm with you. I'm with you. And just to be honest, one thing that a lot of us want is to find a sign of life, one more sign of life with an independent genesis. And then I do think we can, you know, we can all agree that if it formed twice independently, the chance then is just so believable that it's happening elsewhere.

[Adam Grant]

So it's hard for me to even imagine how would it be the case that it's just here, that it's just Earth?

[Sarah Seager]

Sure, let's, for now agree that there has to be intelligent life somewhere out There with trillions of possibilities in our galaxy alone. What we're more focused on in a practical fashion is the nearby stars. So it's not trillions of them or rather hundreds of billions of stars. It's maybe like the nearest hundred stars or the nearest few thousand stars that we can legitimately search with our generations capabilities.

[Adam Grant]

Yep. And then, okay, the probability starts to feel a little smaller at that point.

[Sarah Seager]

It does, unfortunately.

[Adam Grant]

What do you think is the probability that we find intelligent life in, in our lifetime?

[Sarah Seager]

Well, okay, I hate to break it to you just on my personal opinion alone. It's pretty low.

[Adam Grant]

I figured as much.

[Sarah Seager]

I, I might even put it at zero for now.

[Wise App Announcer]

Wow.

[Adam Grant]

And why is it just too far?

[Sarah Seager]

Well, a lot has to happen for intelligent life to evolve, right? I may be getting outside of my depth here, but I think back to like the dinosaurs, right? The dinosaurs dominated. I can't imagine us humans like even coexisting with dinosaurs. They're just so big and vicious. If the dinosaurs had survived, there wouldn't be room for us humans or some other life form to be intelligent there. So it's not just that we have to have planets nearby that have the right conditions for life, but life has to be able to evolve and get to a place where there's room for intelligent life to also evolve and to be willing to communicate with us. There's just a lot that has to go, right?

[Adam Grant]

So what would it mean if there is life on other planets? Like how do you think about our world changing if we do discover it?

[Sarah Seager]

Well, I think that really depends. I think on a daily basis it's not going to change our life. Right. But I definitely think it changes our view of our place in the cosmos. For a long time, for centuries, millennia, people thought that Earth was literally the center of the universe. We thought everything revolved around us. And later on in the Copernican revolution, people recognized or acknowledged or found evidence that we're not the center. But Earth revolves around our sun, and other planets revolve around our sun, and therefore our sun is the center. And later on we realized our sun is just but one of countless stars orbiting the center of our galaxy. And now our galaxy is just one of so many galaxies. So it kind of carries us forward in this cosmic story of what is our place. How do we fit in?

[Adam Grant]

Okay, so timeline wise, how long do you think it might take to discover life if it's out there?

[Sarah Seager]

Well, let's just start with simple bacteria, like not even complex life, just the simplest life form we can think about maybe even simpler than our bacteria here on Earth. Let's start with that. That we hope to have evidence for. Maybe not robust solid findings, but kind of suggestions. We really hope to accomplish that in our lifetime. Starting with our solar system, the subsurface of Mars. One of my favorites is the clouds of Venus. Little primitive microbes just floating around. Perhaps subsurface of one of Jupiter's or Saturn's icy moons, like Enceladus is one of the favorite targets. It's got plumes of water kind of bursting out. And a lot of these places we've seen organic molecules or have hints from models that organic molecules could be there. So I think that is a big, big deal to find signs of primitive life. In terms of exoplanets, we now can study their atmospheres and we're looking there for signs of life, like a few steps removed from actually, you know, collecting samples and looking for bacteria, but gases that don't belong. Like here on Earth, we have oxygen that fills our atmosphere to 20% by volume. But without life, without plants and photosynthetic bacteria, we'd have no oxygen because it's so reactive. So we're looking for gases that don't belong. So I know, I'm like really excited and maybe you and others are not as excited about just finding these tentative hints, but that's where we're at.

[Adam Grant]

No, I think it's tremendously exciting to find even the most basic signs of life anywhere outside of Earth. I mean, that to me would be a, it'd be an earth shattering, no pun intended, discovery. And I think, you know, I guess then there are, I mean, there's so many questions this raises for me. One is the way you do your job. It almost eliminates the Fermi paradox for me.

[Sarah Seager]

In what way?

[Adam Grant]

As I understand it, and please correct my lay understanding. But when I first read about the paradox, it was the idea that, you know, on the one hand, it seems highly likely that there should be intelligent life out there. And on the other hand, if it were the case, we would already know about it and we don't, and therefore what's going on. And from your point of view, it sounds like there are two simple explanations of this. One is that our tools are too primitive to detect it or to reach it. And the second is that it might just be way too far away.

[Sarah Seager]

That is definitely one of my thoughts on it as well. But the other side of the Fermi paradox is if there is like a super intelligence out there, why aren't they coming Here, you know, that's kind of what it is. It's kind of less about us and what we can do and more about what this other supposedly more advanced civilization or civilizations would have done.

[Adam Grant]

But they could also be too far, right. And they could be super intelligent but still not be able to reach us, right?

[Sarah Seager]

I think so. Or they may decide it's not worth the energy to reach us. I mean, it literally takes a lot of energy. Or my favorite theory, actually is that they could maybe do all the above, but they just don't bother. It's like the ants. I mean, unless you live in, like, a concrete block apartment or house, the ants seem to come every year, like in the spring. You know, they come, they do reconnaissance. You get a few ants, and if they hit upon a piece of, like, cat food or something, right? Then you get a whole stream of them. And, you know, they have their own kind of intelligence. You know, they went back and told the team, come this way. But would you talk to those ants? Like, would you say, hey, I'm Adam. I've got this podcast. I mean, I. Well, I actually like to think we're the ants. We are the ants to the super intelligent beings out there. And, like, why would they come here and talk to us?

[Wise App Announcer]

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[Adam Grant]

You know, I think, okay, I wouldn't go and talk to them, but as we do, whenever we discover a new animal species, I would want to study them. Are you suggesting we're not even interesting enough to be studied? Or are you. Are they studying us from a distance? How do you think about that?

[Sarah Seager]

Maybe they're studying us. Just like if we study the ants, do they know we're studying them?

[Adam Grant]

All right, so it might be happening and we're just. We're in the dark about it.

[Sarah Seager]

Maybe. Okay.

[Adam Grant]

As far as we're concerned, I've been so curious for a while about if aliens are out there, is it a good idea to search for them? Tell me if you read this article. There was a Times piece before the pandemic by Steven Johnson called Greetings ET Please Don't Murder Us. And Stephen at least raised the question of should we be galactic introverts rather than galactic extroverts? And it really pushed me to rethink the whole idea of doing the outreach and making contact, because I think the, you know, the best case scenario is really great, but the worst case scenario is existential risk. And when it comes to other forms of existential risk, we proceed extremely cautiously. And so I'm so curious as an expert on this, where do you come down, should we be searching? Should we not be searching? If we find it, should we try to make contact?

[Sarah Seager]

Well, I can say that in the astronomy community people do vigorously debate sending a message. And once in a while some people get together and they're like, hey, we're going to send the signal. And then other people damp them down and like, no, don't send the signal. So that debate is actually an active one.

[Adam Grant]

And where do you come down on it?

[Sarah Seager]

I don't think it matters. I think whether or not we send a signal, I don't think there's anything we can do to get around the fact that others could find us if they're there. And if they have the technology to.

[Adam Grant]

Do that, even if they're like us. I mean, let me phrase that a little differently. I think if they're vastly more intelligent than we are, of course they'll find us. But if they have similar levels of intelligence, they might have an equally difficult time finding us. Right. And it could be millennia or longer before they detect us.

[Sarah Seager]

Right. If they're like us now, they can't find us because we cannot find another Earth twin right now. So at this moment they wouldn't be able to find us. But you know, they could just be a few hundred years ahead of us, which is nothing in cosmic time.

[Paylocity Announcer]

Right?

[Sarah Seager]

And yet they could find us. I mean, the first thing they'll do is they'll see oxygen and they'll know it's a highly reactive gas and shouldn't be there. And so the first thing they'll do is suspect there's some kind of life here. Not necessarily intelligent life, but there's something re engineering the atmosphere. Something that's constantly pumping out oxygen because it's so reactive, it shouldn't last.

[Adam Grant]

So if we find them before they find us, do you think we should make first contact or no?

[Sarah Seager]

I do, I do, but I honestly will go back to what I said over and over again, that if they have the ability to come to us, then they already know we're here.

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[Sarah Seager]

Really?

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[Sarah Seager]

Yeah, really. Look at these listings from dealers.

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Wow, your search can really get that specific.

[Sarah Seager]

Really?

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And you just put in your info and boom. Cars in your budget.

[Sarah Seager]

Mom needs a second. Honey.

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[Sarah Seager]

Really? Or I can pick it up at the dealership. One sec, sweetie. Mommy's buying a car.

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[Sarah Seager]

Again?

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[Sarah Seager]

Autotrader? Buy your car online. Really?

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[Adam Grant]

Would you want to live to see humans make contact with aliens?

[Sarah Seager]

Absolutely, yes.

[Adam Grant]

Why?

[Sarah Seager]

I just think it's part of who we are as humans. We always want a narrative of where we came from and what it means to be human. And like me as the little girl or anyone who hopefully can go out and see the dark night sky. When you look up there, you realize just how much more there is to the world, to us, right, than our daily drudgery. There's so much out there and we just want to know what is out there, who might be out there.

[Adam Grant]

Did you read Project Hail Mary?

[Sarah Seager]

I did. Yes, I did read it.

[Adam Grant]

So Andy Weir was on the show and we had such an interesting conversation about his creative process around imagining what would a different origin of life look like and what kind of planet would they come from. I'm sure you daydream a lot about these kinds of questions. If you imagine us finding life out there, where do you envision it? What does it look like? What are your images?

[Sarah Seager]

Well, believe it or not, we don't do that very often, unless we're asked, like by science fiction people. So we do sometimes think about it, but not in that sense. So, for example, we have thought about this. I mean, one kind of one is that if a planet has like a higher surface gravity than Earth, we expect animals close to the ground with like big, huge legs, so they can, they can defy gravity. Right. It's like the opposite of when you're in the swimming pool and you know how you can lift something really heavy in the pool because the water buoyantly is like helping you hold it up. The opposite of that. A high gravity planet where you can barely drag yourself around. Or we've imagined planets with like, very unscientific. This is just like dreaming. But some of these planets have massive atmospheres and they're probably really dark at the surface, extremely dark and gloomy. Maybe there's birds with giant wings that fly high up, where the wings are like plant leaves. You know, they have photosynthesis ability, like to get energy from their sun while they're flying.

[Adam Grant]

Wow.

[Sarah Seager]

We can easily put a bunch of things together, but it's never really in the context. It's never in the context of like actual scientific work right now.

[Adam Grant]

So I guess one thing this makes me wonder about is what do you make of the fact that so many people are opposed to the idea of being, doing the kind of work you do because we have too many problems here on Earth.

[Sarah Seager]

Right, right. I do get that question a lot.

[Adam Grant]

Do tell.

[Sarah Seager]

I do. Well, you know, the best answer I can give you is to solve practical problems on Earth, we need a lot of people trained in technological sciences, like in physics and engineering and math and other topics. And one of the big things we do in astronomy is we communicate to the public the wonders of science. So I want you to think about young kids and even my origin story where I talked about the night sky. Like small kids don't know about the large defense agencies or they don't know that, you know, someone had to invent insulin or GLP1 or lasers. Right. We don't hear about those. Like telling a little kid, wow, like, lasers are part of our everyday world and, you know, they were just invented from pure physics. Or hey, tell a teenager, you know how you're glued to your GPS because you've got to get somewhere that just came from this kind of long, convoluted, just exploring rockets. Rockets. And people wanted to get beyond Earth's gravity and orbit Earth. So one of the main things is just to attract more people to Science, we need astronomy to show people how great it is. That's number one, encouraging people to go into STEM fields. The second one is that it's really hard to explain to people that pure science of any kind is needed and may at the outset seem wasteful. But those things I've just mentioned, GPS and medicines and lasers and so many things, you have to do so much extra science, you know, just to get to a discovery. You can't pre plan what it is you want to do. And I do have an analogy that is a bit of a sad analogy, but it's also a legit one. I got to go to the UK with when my kids were younger on a soccer tour. They call it football, of course. And honestly, there's so many players that go through the talent pipeline just for the very few that make it to the top teams. And so all of science is like that. You have a ton of stuff happening and you'll be like, why do I support astronomy? Why do I support this? Why do I support that? That's why in astronomy we take credit for some medical imaging, because we had to translate our data to images. And so we need to get that message out of why we spend so much on science. Because without doing that, we can't find the discoveries that were not conceivable before.

[Adam Grant]

Yeah, I think that that tracks with what I know about the psychology of creativity. One of the the most successful models in the field is basically a model of blind variation and selective retention. This is Dean Simonson's work probably most seminally, but basically what it says is just like evolution. Idea generation requires a tremendous amount of variety. There's going to be a lot of noise and the challenge is to find the signal and then hone in on it. And I think maybe underscoring that, I've read some evidence that approximately half of all patents are either accidental or spontaneous discoveries, you know, not driven by a planned search of any kind. And so I think you're spot on.

[Sarah Seager]

Great. Well, I'm glad that one resonated with you. But one more we should ask ourselves, like, as a society, should we have exploration? Should we have great art and great music and parts of science are like that?

[Adam Grant]

Yeah, they're kind of like creative adventures just for the sake of them.

[Sarah Seager]

That's right.

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[Sarah Seager]

Really? I can get super specific with dealer listings and see cars based on my budget.

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[Adam Grant]

Okay, I want to go to a lightning round. I've got a few rapid fire questions for you. One is what is the worst career advice you've ever gotten?

[Sarah Seager]

Don't go into astrophysics. You'll never make it.

[Adam Grant]

Glad you ignored that one best advice. As somebody who's not been afraid to take scientific risks, I could give maybe.

[Sarah Seager]

More than one answer. But one idea is hone your inner voice. Like unpack your successes and then try to develop that inner voice. Like, you know, if you're walking in the back alley and there's like a shady character, you feel you're worried and you go the other way. But we also have that same in a positive way for science and for everything we do. Right. Like you may meet someone and be like, hey, wow, I need to get to know this person better. Or you know, you may have the opposite vibe. But we have that in science also. So honing that, that's the best advice I haven't gotten, but that I can give.

[Adam Grant]

Yep. Okay. Following that, do you have a hypothesis, a hunch, or an opinion that's controversial in your field?

[Sarah Seager]

Yes. Right now it's that there could be life microbial life on Venus in the clouds of Venus that are not made of friendly water but are made of concentrated sulfuric acid that kills all of our life instantly.

[Adam Grant]

Wow. Oh, if you turn out to be right on that one, that will be a revolution. Okay, let's see. Do you have a favorite space film?

[Sarah Seager]

I can't say I have a single space film. But I love all the films about meeting intelligent aliens. One is called Arrival, because it's really a film that doesn't assume these aliens are little green humanoids instead. They're like a weird kind of life that we can't really communicate with. We can't actually. And so I really like that depiction of it. I love the time travel movie, actually. I love every movie that has to do with time travel. I know time travel is not possible, but I just love that idea of, like, getting put in the future or the past. Some of the other movies I love Interstellar. What a great movie. Because as much info as we can get about exoplanets now or in the future, we'll never know the little details. And in interstellar, you know, they found planets. They may be places for us to go in the future, but until they actually go there, they don't know if we humans were so fragile, could survive on these other worlds.

[Adam Grant]

Great choices. If you got to host a dinner party for anyone in history, alive or dead, who would you invite?

[Sarah Seager]

You know, I'm not the one who admires people or has heroes. It's just, like, who I am as a person. But I would definitely invite dead family members. I would definitely want to bring them all back and have a moment that makes sense.

[Adam Grant]

I have to wonder, though, like, you wouldn't want to sit at dinner with Copernicus and Galileo?

[Sarah Seager]

Honestly? Probably not. Like, it might be fun. I don't know. I mean, there's something about having people in the past or people who are no longer alive. There's something about just preserving your memory and what you know about them. Like, what if you invited Kepler or Copernicus and they were a total ass? Like, how would you feel? Wouldn't that just, like, shatter your dream of these people? But no, no, no.

[Adam Grant]

I have modest expectations of their personality and character. I just think it would be so interesting to bring, you know, somebody who was responsible for one revolution into a time where there have been many others and see how they react. And like. Or, you know, you take like. I don't know, like, I would love to have a dinner with Einstein reacting to the gravitational waves. Discovery.

[Sarah Seager]

I see.

[Adam Grant]

Okay, now that that hypothesis is supported, what does he envision next?

[Sarah Seager]

Right? Or maybe you'd like to bring someone from the future who would tell us our fate. Or if we're going to become those, maybe cyborg, or maybe not. Maybe we'll be all taken over by AI.

[Adam Grant]

Okay, I give you the mic now. I think it's time. Do you have A question for me.

[Sarah Seager]

Well, I do have a question for you. I'd like to know what motivates you.

[Adam Grant]

What motivates me? I think there are a lot of things and it's a weird question to answer. As somebody who studies motivation, like, I should probably have a well thought out answer to this. But what seems to motivate me most consistently is one, a desire to help other people and two, a love of learning. I think those are kind of the twin joys of the work that I do. I remember. I don't know if I've ever felt as well captured by a quote as when I stumbled across EB White saying, I wake up in the morning torn between a desire to enjoy the world and a desire to improve the world. And this makes it very difficult to plan the day. And I feel that conflict a lot. But I think I've mostly been able to resolve it by trying to improve people's lives in a very small way through both discovering and communicating knowledge about what makes humans tick. I just find that endlessly fascinating.

[Sarah Seager]

I like it. Thanks for sharing that.

[Adam Grant]

Wow. Thank you for asking. I think what motivates me is understanding what motivates other people and then trying to help motivate them. That would have been a more succinct answer, wouldn't it?

[Sarah Seager]

I like it.

[Adam Grant]

Yes. Okay, so before we wrap, I just want to ask you, you have said frequently that we shouldn't be so arrogant as to assume that we are alone in the universe. Why? Why is that arrogant?

[Sarah Seager]

It's just self centered, really. Like thinking that we're the only thing that could be out there.

[Adam Grant]

And what would you like to replace that with?

[Sarah Seager]

Humility. When you look at that night sky and just realize our earth is just a speck, we're like less than a speck of dust. I like that view because it's tough to get through life. Like we have a lot of high highs, low lows, and in the midst of all that lowness, I don't know if this is good or bad, but confronting like our own tragedies against the vastness of the universe, it somehow brings comfort. Aha.

[Adam Grant]

Okay, so this is a, this is kind of a perspective taking or self distancing intervention for you where when you realize how insignificant we are, it makes what seem like, it makes all the big problems seem smaller.

[Sarah Seager]

It definitely does. That's why I like it. That's why I love the universe.

[Adam Grant]

I love it. Well, Sarah, thank you for taking the time to chat today. This is, this is like being a kid. In a candy store for me. So thank you.

[Sarah Seager]

Thank you, Adam. It was great chatting with you.

[Adam Grant]

Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by Ted with Cosmic Standard. Our producer is Jessica Glaser. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our engineer is Asia Pilar Simpson. Our technical director is Jacob Winick. And our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Roxanne Hylash, Banban Chang, Julia Dickerson, Tansika Sung Manivong and Whitney Pennington Rogers. Original music by Hans Dale sue and Alison Layton Brown.

[Sarah Seager]

You know, we could self destruct us humans. We could turn into AI or AI could, you know, eat us. But the cockroaches will still be here. Like when you think of the vastness of the universe and us self destructing, those cockroaches are very hardy.

[Adam Grant]

Yeah, it's true. I would prefer to see nematodes survive.

[Sarah Seager]

Nematodes. Yeah.

[Autotrader Announcer]

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[Sarah Seager]

Really? I can get super specific with dealer listings and see cars based on my budget.

[Autotrader Announcer]

You can really have it delivered or pick it up.

[Sarah Seager]

Mommy, look.

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[Sarah Seager]

Really? Autotrader, buy your car online. Really?

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