Preet Bharara:

From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Adam Frank:

We’re indelibly woven into this network, this infinitely complex network that is all of life, that is the entire history of the planet. Which, therefore, is also the entire history of the solar system. So, I think there’s a very different view emerging.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Adam Frank. He’s a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester. He spent much of his life studying what lies beyond our galaxy and making it make sense for folks like you and me. He’s written several books about the cosmos and frequently writes for major publications about astronomy and culture. News about the universe is always floating around. UFO sightings, private space exploration, asteroids headed towards us. Professor Frank joins me to answer some complicated scientific questions like what’s the probability of finding alien life in the near future. Could we live on or in an asteroid in space? And, what is the meaning of this thing we call life? That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Q&A

Now, let’s get to your questions.

This question comes in a tweet from Twitter user, Myriam, who asks simply, “Who will go first? Willis or Smith?” Exclamation mark, question mark. Obviously, Myriam is referring to the question that is on everyone’s mind and maybe answered before you even hear this podcast. That is with respect to election interference and the January 6th issue, which prosecutor will file charges first against Donald Trump. Fani Willis, who is the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, with respect to election interference that she’s alleging, we believe, in connection with the Georgia election? Or, Jack Smith, the special counsel at the Department of Justice.

If you had asked this question some time ago, I would’ve answered, “Well, I think it’s almost certain that Willis would go first because she had a head start in the investigation.” She was putting witnesses into the grand jury. There was a special grand jury convened, as you may recall, in Georgia that made the recommendation to bring actual felony charges with respect to election interference in Georgia. So, there was a big head start. If you’re a regular listener to the podcast, you know that I and Joyce Vance and others have wondered why it was the case that the Department of Justice didn’t seem to be doing a lot with respect to Donald Trump and his immediate orbit when they were investigating the January 6th insurrection.

Well, a few months later, Jack Smith seems to have caught up. And, the reason I think that Jack Smith is going first is, in the last number of days, he and his team have issued a target letter to President Trump. If prior history is any prologue, that usually means that an indictment will quickly follow. Whether it’ll happen this week or next week is anyone’s guess. But, I think that’ll be the first shoe to drop. Or, I guess if you’re keeping count, the third shoe to drop. And, Fani Willis will be the fourth.

Now, implicit in your question, I guess, is whether or not there’s been any coordination between the Fulton County DA and the special counsel, Jack Smith. I don’t think there has been any formal coordination. First of all, there’s no requirement that there be any coordination. There may be some overlapping facts and maybe a few overlapping witnesses. But I expect the federal government’s case to be much broader in scope. Will relate not just to Georgia, but also to all the events that happened on January 6th and in some other states as well. It’s the prerogative of the Justice Department to pursue its cases because it’s a sovereign prosecutor, as is the Fulton County DA.

One final note, just because Jack Smith may go first with respect to either the Mar-a-Lago documents case, which has already been indicted, or the January 6th case, which has not. Doesn’t mean that those trials will happen first. That’ll be up to the individual judges in the individual districts based on how they think the timing should unfold and how quickly they can get the discovery done and how complicated the issues are and how many motions there are. So, it’s possible that even if Fani Willis goes forth in terms of the order of indictment, she may not be forth in terms of when the trial begins.

This question comes from Twitter user, Gwendolyn, who says, “Hi, I’m an attorney. I worked on managing one case in my career so far where a defendant received a target letter but wasn’t ever indicted. How often does that happen? #AskPreet.” I don’t know how often it happens. I should also make clear to folks that there is no absolute requirement that the target letter be sent to somebody who is in fact considered to be a target by a local prosecutor and certainly not by the federal government. Sometimes it’s sent, sometimes it’s not. I don’t think there was any formal requirement that Donald Trump be sent a target letter in either the Mar-a-Lago documents case or in the January 6th case. What I will say more broadly answering your question, once the government determines that an individual is a target, someone about whom they’re likely to have proof that they can bring to bear beyond a reasonable doubt, that they’re guilty of violating a federal statute, usually that status does not change.

But, if they’re doing their jobs right and they have an open mind and the process is fair, and the people involved in the process, as I’ve often written, are fair-minded, new evidence comes to light. Sometimes there are presentations by the target and the target’s lawyers. I was present for many such presentations myself during my time as US Attorney. And, sometimes, minds are changed because arguments that may not have been considered as fully as they should have been by the prosecutors are made by able defense lawyers.

Defenses are raised that maybe weren’t fully fleshed out by the prosecution memo that the prosecutors may have prepared within their own offices, which is why I think an open and transparent process and a non-covert investigation, and many investigations are covert and have to be necessarily. But, in non-covert investigations where the inquiry is open and notorious and there’s an exchange of information between the target’s lawyers and the prosecutors who are making a decision and deliberating on the very profound choice of bringing a charge or not bringing a charge, sometimes that free flow of information results in the eventuality that you caused to happen with respect to that one client you mentioned in your question, that someone is a target, maybe even has gotten a target letter. But, at the end of the day, all things considered in the totality of the circumstances, the government decides to stand down. Doesn’t happen a lot, but it does happen. And, the fact that it happens shows that the process is working.

This question comes in a tweet from Twitter user, @billbixby88. I trust, Bill Bixby, that you were not the actor who played Bruce Banner on the original incredible Hulk on network television. The question is, “Hi, Preet. You feature a lot of authors on your podcast and are an author yourself. What’s your stance on signing books? Did you ask Robert Caro to sign Master of the Senate after your interview with him?” I do have a lot of authors because they’re very thoughtful and smart. Before the pandemic, when most of the interviews took place in person at our studio in Manhattan, from time to time if I remembered, I would have an author sign a book.

You asked specifically about Robert Caro, who is a hero of mine. I revere him. I revere his books. I revere his scholarship. I revere his storytelling. And, I did not ask him to sign my book because I think I was so in awe of his presence and I was so nervous about the interview. And, I do get nervous about some interviews. I wanted to do a good job asking questions of this person who I’d been reading for decades and who was, I think, one of the greatest biographers of our generation or any generation. You have reminded me that I was remiss and I lost my opportunity. Maybe I’ll have one again. My stance on signing books for other people, I sign them all the time. I’ve signed thousands of copies of my books at book events and at speaking events. I think signing books is great.

I’ll be right back with my conversation with Adam Frank.

THE INTERVIEW

People often talk about saving the Earth when it comes to climate change. But, it’s not the Earth that will need saving if the climate becomes unlivable. It’s us. Astrophysics professor, Adam Frank, joins me to put issues like climate change into a larger perspective and to break down some of science’s most complicated questions. Professor Adam Frank, welcome to the show.

Adam Frank:

Oh, it’s a great pleasure. Thank you.

Preet Bharara:

I am very excited to speak with you about so many things. Some people may not realize this, but I’ve often said that, as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a lawyer. Even at some point I wanted to be a government lawyer, prosecutor. But, I did in fact have one ambition earlier in my youth that predates wanting to be a lawyer. In fact, my ambition when I was I guess 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 years old, was to be an astronomer.

Adam Frank:

There you go.

Preet Bharara:

I studied everything I could about astronomy. This would be the seventies. I was fascinated by the cosmos. I read a lot of science fiction. And, here, I have a real-life astronomer to whom I can put any question I want. Is that the deal with us?

Adam Frank:

I am ready to go. I have a very similar story. I just didn’t change. I got interested in astronomy when I was five in the seventies, when I was a kid in the seventies. Because, my dad was a writer and he had science fiction, the Pulp magazines, in his library.

Preet Bharara:

Oh yeah.

Adam Frank:

Looking at those covers blew my mind. That was it. The Hayden Planetarium, my sister was forced to go there so many times.

Preet Bharara:

It’s a little odd. I’ve always said a lot of little boys and girls aspire to be astronauts. I didn’t. I didn’t want to go visit. I wanted to be the telescope. What does that say about you and me?

Adam Frank:

Yeah. Yeah, right. Well, I would’ve done the astronaut thing. But, I really wanted to leave the solar system. I mean, Mars was not good enough for me. I actually was… For a while, I thought maybe it was the air-

Preet Bharara:

But, you can’t even get to Mars.

Adam Frank:

Yeah. Well, that’s right. But, I wanted the galactic throne. I wanted to be the heir to the galactic throne. That didn’t work out.

Preet Bharara:

My first question is about the rate at which our knowledge is advancing. I remember when I was a kid, which is not that long ago. My kids think it was a long time ago. But, it’s not centuries ago. It’s a few decades ago. At that point, we had not yet definitively identified any planet outside of our own solar system. Some people still thought there was a network of canals on Mars. I think we were just beginning to understand the Big Bang Theory. And, most importantly, if you’re of a certain age, Pluto was still considered a planet. Since then, if you could just take us through by what order of magnitude our knowledge increases. There’s this thing called Moore’s Law which suggests that the processing speed of a microprocessor doubles every 18 months. Is there a similar characterization you can make about our knowledge of the cosmos?

Adam Frank:

Well, it’s interesting that you’re bringing up Moore’s Law because I would say that, yes, knowledge, astronomical knowledge in particular, has followed Moore’s law. One reason is because of computers. These technologies are what drive the increase in knowledge. And, it has been exponential. The things, the exoplanet stuff, the discovery of planets orbiting other stars, is one thing that I really like to point out. Because, that’s a 2,500 year old question. You can see Aristotle and Democrates arguing about it and-

Preet Bharara:

As recently as when I was young, people weren’t sure we would ever be able to definitively identify an exoplanet. That challenge was met pretty quickly.

Adam Frank:

Yeah. I can’t tell you how many astronomical careers going up into the seventies, as you said, of people falling on their swords of making a claim of an exoplanet detection and then having it be wrong and then they’re humiliated. Now, it was ’95 that the first exoplanet around a sun-like star was discovered. That was a game changer. But, now, we’ve gotten to the point where we know that every star in the sky, when you go out and look at stars, every one of them has at least one planet if not a family of worlds.

Preet Bharara:

Wait. Let’s do that numerically for a moment. As of 1995, which is only, if I’m doing my math correctly, 28 years ago, no exoplanets identified by the human race.

Adam Frank:

Zero. Yes.

Preet Bharara:

Since then, how many have been positively identified, putting aside your inference that you just mentioned about every star having some kind of planetary system? How many specific exoplanets, meaning planets outside of our own solar system, have been identified?

Adam Frank:

5,000.

Preet Bharara:

5,000. What is the basis for your conclusion, or astronomers’ conclusion, that every star has at least one?

Adam Frank:

Yeah. What we do now, because what we’ve done is we’ve made a census. We went from like, “Oh my God, we just found an exoplanet,” in 28 years to being like, “Oh yeah, we know enough about them to be able to say what the average kind of planet is like, what the average kind of star that has planets are like.” By having 5,000-

Preet Bharara:

I see.

Adam Frank:

… and having-

Preet Bharara:

You’re extrapolating from the sample.

Adam Frank:

Yeah. The sample is now so large that we have really high confidence in that idea that every star has a planet and every five stars has a planet in the orbit where life could form, what we call the habitable zone.

Preet Bharara:

Explain to people how it is we know about the 5,000 planets. We don’t have telescopes that are powerful enough to see the planet like we see Jupiter or Saturn or some of the others in our own solar system. That’s also a process of inference. Explain that.

Adam Frank:

Yeah. This is, again, this advance in technology. The first planets that we discovered, we discovered by actually watching the movement of the stars. When a planet goes around a star, the star actually goes around the planet as well. I mean, they’re actually orbiting around what’s called the center of mass. The planet’s doing this orbit. But, the star is also wobbling back and forth. So, in ’95, we had technologies that were good enough that could analyze the light coming from the star and actually detect that back and forth wobble. Encoded in that wobble is the mass and the radius of the planet.

That’s how we discovered the first planets was what we call the wobble method. But then, another way of finding exoplanets was to look for basically what is the interstellar equivalent of an eclipse. When a planet passes in front of a star, between us and the star it’s going around in its orbit, the light dims a little bit. It blocks a little bit of the starlight so that the planet blocking the starlight, with the sensitive enough detectors, we can see this tiny 1% dimunition in the light of the star. How that light dims encodes all kinds of information, like the size of the planet, the size of the orbit, et cetera. That is the wholesale method. That’s how we really started getting the 5,000.

Preet Bharara:

Right. Was that an epiphany about a method in or about the mid-nineties or was that and also more sensitive instruments?

Adam Frank:

That’s a really interesting story. Because, this actually brings SETI into it, the search for intelligent life. Because, in both cases, it’s the story of technology. But, what’s interesting is people… In the late 1970s, NASA held a couple of workshops bringing astronomers together. This was really driven by the SETI people, the people who wanted to find life, intelligent life in the universe.

They tried to map out, okay, what kind of technologies do we need? And, everybody focused on that wobble method. There was this one guy, Bill Borucki, who was like, “No, no, no. The transit method, the little eclipses, that should work.” And, NASA was like, “Yeah, whatever.” And, he kept putting in proposal after proposal. And, finally, he basically beat them down and showed them this method could work. This transit method is what the Kepler space telescope, which was launched in like 2011, that is the one that gave us the 5,000. It was a wholesale way of finding exoplanets. It was both a story of ingenuity, of determination, and technology.

Preet Bharara:

You have written that the universe is not teaming with life. I’m curious as to why you say that, given how many planets are believed to be in the habitable zone in their orbits around their stars, and the sheer number of total planets that there are.

Adam Frank:

Well, I don’t think… I mean, what I meant in that piece was… This was just recently. I think that the universe… One of the things, we did this paper in 2016, that we showed that there are 10 billion trillion habitable zone planets in the universe.

Preet Bharara:

That sounds pretty teeming.

Adam Frank:

That’s pretty… Yeah. But, again, we don’t know how many of those-

Preet Bharara:

That’s still a small percentage of the total.

Adam Frank:

Well, actually, that’s a pretty reasonable… It’s because there’s so many planets, that’s actually not a small… That’s actually about on the order of 20% of the total. Because, so many planets are in the right place for life. What I was really saying, I was just recently pointing this out, that what you really have to know about is how many of those… Every one of those is an experiment that nature is running with planets and life. There is the possibility that it could be, especially intelligent life, might be rare. As a scientist, I have a certain view, keeping my scientist hat on. As a person, knowing those numbers, I tend to believe that there’s been a lot of life in the universe and particularly intelligent life. But, whether or not there’s anybody in the galaxy right now, because we don’t know how long civilizations last. That’s the interesting question for us in particular. It’s possible that-

Preet Bharara:

Maybe not that long.

Adam Frank:

Right. We’ve only been… Yeah. We’ve only been an industrial civilization, “for a hundred years or so.” And, yeah, we’re not doing that well right now. Are we unusual or is this kind of the typical trajectory for a civilization? So, I’m agnostic about it. But, in my heart, I believe that the universe has been full of life. There’s probably lots and lots of planets that have biospheres, they have forests-

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I was going to ask the distinction between intelligent and non-intelligent life. I understand why we make that distinction. But, just tell folks the consensus about the likelihood that there is life, some kind of biological life out there, is near certainty. Fair?

Adam Frank:

Well, I would say consensus. I’d be careful about that just because… And, this is what’s really interesting. Because the consensus-

Preet Bharara:

Well, what’s your view? What’s your view?

Adam Frank:

My view, based on… And, this is what we argue about. We in the field argue about-

Preet Bharara:

It would seem… I’m not an astronomer. I left astronomy when I was 11. But, given the sheer numbers of trillions of planets, it doesn’t seem to be radical to say that there is life on some of them.

Adam Frank:

I think that’s a reasonable assumption to make because there are so many. But, the thing is, if I give you a hundred or a million planets, but the odds of forming life on them is one in 2 million, then you’ve just run out of… It all depends on the probabilities associated with-

Preet Bharara:

And, at the particular moment that you’re observing as well.

Adam Frank:

Yeah. As in the particular moment. I mean, what’s interesting, I do think… Here’s what I think the consensus in the community is. Simple life, microbial life, is probably easy to form. The reason we say that, we have some data about this, is that in the history of the Earth, the Earth formed about four and a half billion years ago, and probably by 3.8 billion years ago, there was microbial life. Almost as soon as the Earth cooled down to the point where the surface you could have life on it, life appeared. That makes you think like, “Oh, it’s not hard.” As soon as you get the chance, it’ll happen. Intelligent life, though, you now have to wait another almost 3 billion years before intelligence shows up. In fact, you have to wait… It’s only half a billion years ago that even animals, complex life, shows up. It was all microbes up until about half a billion years ago. That maybe indicates that, oh, it’s a little bit harder to do that.

Preet Bharara:

Now, do the laws of evolution as have been given down, the principles of evolution, apply intergalactically?

Adam Frank:

That is such an awesome question. I think the answer is yes.

Preet Bharara:

Because, if you start with microbes somewhere, is it inevitable or was it something special about Earth that caused those life forms to evolve?

Adam Frank:

Well, I think absolutely the laws of evolution hold because there’s a certain logic. Evolution is more than just laws. It’s this logic of, look, if I’ve got life forming and life is about reproduction, and it also has the possibility of mutation, of change, what that means is… The environment’s always going to be changing. What that means is, whenever you get life, a mutation or something that happens, that is more fit for the environment, it’s going to win. That’s just a logic. So, in that sense, I think evolution is going to be the rule.

However, evolution doesn’t have a plan. Sometimes we think of ourselves as, oh, the whole Earth history was waiting for us. But, really, if you ran the Earth’s history over again, started it back, we probably never would’ve shown up. Because, there’s so many accidents that have to happen. Also, intelligence, as you can see, our kind of intelligence may not be such a great thing in terms of living for a long time as a species. Sharks have been around for a hundred million years. Is a technological civilization going to be around for a hundred million years? Maybe actually our kind of intelligence isn’t going to help. I hope that’s not true. But, I’m just saying that that’s a possibility.

Preet Bharara:

I’m going to jump ahead just for a brief second. But, I’m want to get back to this later. But, you put the thought in my head. Do the principles of evolution and the rules of evolution apply to artificial intelligence?

Adam Frank:

Yeah. Oh my God, man. What a timely question too. Yes, it should. I wouldn’t see any reason why, if artificial intelligence-

Preet Bharara:

Thereby answering the question of whether or not we will last a hundred million years. No.

Adam Frank:

That’s right. Well, we can get into AI. I have my own opinions about what the problems with AI… I don’t think AI is going to go SkyNet on us and launch all the nuclear weapons to get rid of us.

Preet Bharara:

Well, I don’t want to get ahead of us. I want to stick to alien life. By the way, I should mention that you have a book coming out-

Adam Frank:

I do.

Preet Bharara:

… in the near future called The Little Book of Aliens, which is a great title. I wonder if you have aspirations for it to be a show on Broadway. It sounds like Little Shop of Horrors.

Adam Frank:

That’s exactly-

Preet Bharara:

The Little Book of Aliens.

Adam Frank:

… I want Broadway musical. I want everyone… Yes, yes.

Preet Bharara:

I can see it on the Marquis. I was joking about this. Then we’ll get serious again in a moment. That every time you see aliens in the movies, not every time, but it seems like a vast majority of times, aliens coming to the Earth either in peace or to harm us or to take us over or to eat us, they’re always some form of reptile. What’s the likelihood that the first extraterrestrials we make contact with will be reptilian?

Adam Frank:

Yeah, human-shaped reptilians as well. They got the long arms. They basically look like us with… This is the principle of prosthetic foreheads, as I call it. Every science fiction movie you see is some version of… Especially depending on the budget, of just sticking something on somebody’s forehead. Oh, it’s an alien. They got antenna. Or, pointed ears or a reptile mask. The thing is, as we just talked about, evolution does not work that way.

When we meet aliens, certainly what’s cool about thinking about evolution on other planets, is you can see how physics and the laws of physics and chemistry will probably guide evolution to make similar choices on different planets. We call that convergent evolution. Like wings. We’ve seen wings evolve on Earth a bunch of different times from totally different evolutionary trajectories. Because, wings are a good solution because you live in the air. But, that doesn’t mean anything’s going to end up looking like a humanoid. Again, the role of accidents in evolution mean that you’re probably never going to get humans again anywhere else. It really speaks to the lack of imagination or budget of most science fiction stories.

Preet Bharara:

We talked about the way you can infer the existence of other planets because we’re at a great remove from those planets. Everyone is interested in finding out if you have life, intelligent or otherwise, on other planets. What’s the method by which… Before we’ve perfected any kind of space travel at that distance, what’s the method by which we will ever be able to determine that there is some kind of life on another planet?

Adam Frank:

This is, to me, one of the… And, I covered this in the book. One of the most extraordinary and exciting things happening in astronomy today, which is that we can do it. We know how to do it, and we have the technologies to do it. Here’s the thing, and actually the guy who showed us this was the guy who showed us the Gaia theory, who showed us actually about climate change, James Lovelock.

James Lovelock, he was this polymath who… People who know about climate change know about him from what’s called the Gaia theory, which is that the life… When life forms on a planet, it hijacks the planet’s evolution. It just takes over. The history of the planet is now entirely different. What he realized was that the atmosphere of a planet with life will look totally different than the atmosphere of a planet without life.

For example, the oxygen. We should all take a nice deep breath. That oxygen you’re breathing is only there because of life. For the first billion years of Earth’s history, when it had life, we had life on Earth, there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. It was because evolution created these microbes that did photosynthesis, took energy from the sun in a way that spit out, or even farted out if you want to put it that way, oxygen. That’s why 21% of the atmosphere is oxygen. What we can do now is we can look at distant planets and we can… In that transit method I was talking about, when the planet passes in front of the star, the light from the star will pass through the planet’s atmosphere for a moment, and we can grab that light and analyze it. In that light will be the signature of whatever chemicals are in the atmosphere.

If we see oxygen in a exoplanet, we pretty much know that there’s life there, that there was a biosphere that put it there. If we see something like chlorofluorocarbons, those chemicals that almost ate the ozone, we know there’s an industrial civilization there. And, we have those capacities. We’re just now with the JWST getting those capacities. The next telescopes that we’re building now, we’ll have them in spades. We are ready now. For the first time in history, we are ready now to find life, dumb or smart, on alien worlds.

Preet Bharara:

If there’s enough of it on a planet.

Adam Frank:

If there’s enough of it. Exactly. That’s what we’ll see. But, one way or the other, we’re going to answer this question that we have been yelling at each other, setting each other on fire over, over the last 2,500 years.

Preet Bharara:

What’s the date? What’s the date, Adam?

Adam Frank:

When it’s going to happen?

Preet Bharara:

When are we going to find… Yeah.

Adam Frank:

As I like to say, science is a long game. You don’t answer the most impressive and the hardest question you’ve ever answered in three days. But, I think within a decade or two or three, we will have data that’s relevant to the answer. I can’t tell you what the answer’s going to be. But, we took data just a couple of weeks ago that we were looking for an atmosphere on a planet, and we found there was no atmosphere. So, you could say, “Well, we didn’t find life.” Yeah. But, we found something that was relevant to life. As time goes on and we look at more planets, the data’s going to be there and we’ll see.

Preet Bharara:

Ballpark figure, how many of the exoplanets are made of green cheese?

Adam Frank:

6,442.

Preet Bharara:

That was also my prediction.

Adam Frank:

Except for the two, we were off by a couple of percent.

Preet Bharara:

Part of the reason I ask is… And, I guess maybe we don’t care about these people. But, there are some folks in modern society who don’t believe we went to the moon.

Adam Frank:

Oh God.

Preet Bharara:

Who think the moon is a hoax.

Adam Frank:

Flat-earthers, same thing.

Preet Bharara:

I guess it doesn’t matter that we convince people if the scientific discovery has ever happened upon that there’s an atmosphere and life on a distant planet. I guess, do we care that we have people who don’t believe that or not?

Adam Frank:

I don’t think it’s going to matter that much. I mean, the rise of science denial, as you know in the kinds of things you cover, it’s very much a political… Is an artifact of the things that are happening in culture now. It’s late-stage capitalism plus artificial intelligence in the form of social media, et cetera. But, it’s not going to matter, not in the long run. Because, think about the Copernican Revolution. Before the Copernican Revolution in whatever, 1600, everybody thought the sun was going around the Earth. Then after the Copernican Revolution, it was the opposite. People recognized that the Earth was going around the sun. That played a huge role, even if people didn’t know it, in the reformation, in the rise of the mercantile class. I mean, it was part of this revolution about how humans understood themselves in the universe. If we find life, even dumb life, even microbes, it’ll play a similar role. It will rewrite how human beings understand themselves in the universe.

Preet Bharara:

One way we can discover if there’s life is by the methods that you described. Another way, and we alluded to it very briefly in passing, is that alien life forms come and visit us. There’s a lot of speculation because it’s exciting, and part of me wants to believe it to be true, that some of these UFOs… By the way, they’re not called UFOs anymore. What are they called?

Adam Frank:

UAPs? Unidentified aerial phenomena.

Preet Bharara:

I mean, that’s just ridiculous.

Adam Frank:

I know.

Preet Bharara:

Why can’t we just call them UFOs?

Adam Frank:

Rebranding.

Preet Bharara:

You are skeptical as a scientist that any of those sightings, any of things taken into custody by any government indicate, outside of the Earth or outside the solar system, life. Why is that?

Adam Frank:

Well, there’s a bunch of reasons for this. I mean, the first one is that, if you look at the history, and for the book I go through the history, is that it’s a mess. I mean, it’s nothing but blobby photographs and conspiracy theories. There’s never been the kind of data that we would require to be able to make that kind of leap. As Carl Sagan said, extraordinary conclusions or extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You’re not even close to that. Even with these Navy videos. There was those Navy videos that came out a few years ago, and everybody was so excited about them, and people were claiming, “Look, at these speeds. These things are moving at impossible speeds.” The NASA panel, which recently convened and had their first meeting, they showed an analysis of one of those videos, the one where you see the tic-tac thing zooming over the ocean.

It turns out that was moving… Do the analysis. You decide. You can look at what’s happening and do some simple calculations. It was going at 40 miles an hour. I can go faster than that on my bike rolling downhill. So, there’s just never been quality data. Whenever anybody looks at… When they do any kind of analysis, it turns out that maybe only 10%, 5%, really can’t be explained. Sometimes those lack of explanations is because you just don’t have enough data to start an explanation.

Now, if I could just… However, there’s an important, however there. There was a very important paper written by a guy named James McDonald, who was an atmospheric physicist in the sixties. He took it upon himself to go back and look at some of these unexplained cases in previous government reports. He definitely found… He went back and interviewed people, and he definitely found some that were pretty freaky deaky, that really raised the hair on the back of your neck. So, it’s possible. It still is possible. There are some narratives about life in the universe that I can imagine why they might be here or how they might be here. But, in general, you look at the data that exists and it is not even close to letting you make that leap that these things are doing something that is non-terrestrial technology.

Preet Bharara:

Of all the various related endeavors that are connected to the analysis of space and bodies and systems outside of our own solar system, or even within our solar system for that matter. It may include unmanned missions to the moon and to nearby planets, probes that maybe go to the outer planets, telescopes we put into space, things that we can do here on Earth like you’ve been describing, which of those is the most important for gaining necessary and important, and maybe even pragmatic scientific understanding? I guess that’s a long way of asking, if you had the ability to control the entire cosmos budget on Earth, how would you allocate it?

Adam Frank:

Wow, that’s interesting. I mean, are we talking about life in the universe? Or, are we talking about just-

Preet Bharara:

Sort of everything.

Adam Frank:

Scientific knowledge? Scientific knowledge?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Adam Frank:

Well, yeah, I mean, to me, telescopes and robot rovers are probably where you’re going to… are probably the best bet. We could have right now… Here’s an amazing thing. On one of the moon’s orbiting Saturn, the ringed planet Saturn, is called Titan, and it’s got giant lakes, semi oceans, of liquid methane. Right now, if we wanted to, we could put the money-

Preet Bharara:

How much does that smell, by the way?

Adam Frank:

It smells good. It’s going back to farts. We’re going to make a lot of fart jokes in this.

Preet Bharara:

No, I was going to say the evolution of animals on that planet, on that moon, they have very small noses. It’s so odd. Their nostrils are infinitesimal.

Adam Frank:

Non-existent. Yeah, right. But, there was a proposal to have a submarine. We could have sent a submarine that would’ve cruised around those. And, we didn’t do it because there’s not enough money in the budget. I think those kinds of things yield… And, these space telescopes. I mean, there’s just amazing things that we could do if we had the funding for it. Including, again, even think about life on the solar system. We’ve got at least two moons that have subsurface oceans. There’s more water on the moon, Europa, orbiting Jupiter than there is in all of Earth’s oceans. It’s crazy.

Preet Bharara:

Wait, that’s an enormous amount.

Adam Frank:

I know. It’s incredible. The deepest part of the ocean on Earth is six miles deep. Europa’s ocean is 100 miles deep and it’s covered in-

Preet Bharara:

What’s that ocean made of?

Adam Frank:

Water. Liquid water.

Preet Bharara:

Is there some likelihood that there is some microbiotic life?

Adam Frank:

There is. I mean, likelihood, it’s possible. We even know how it might be powered, where the energy would come from. Because, it’s covered… This is the wild thing. It’s so far out in space that the ocean itself is covered by probably 10 miles of ice. So, there’s no sunlight getting into the ocean. But, the geothermal activity, the core, the rocky core of this moon, is constantly getting squeezed by Jupiter’s super gravity. It generates heat and the heat bubbles up probably into the… Just like how it does on Earth. That could be a site where life could form. It’s crazy.

Preet Bharara:

Is the future of space exploration… Does it lie in the hands of governments or private parties? If it’s private parties, is it just those three billionaires?

Adam Frank:

Yeah, this is an interesting question. I am all in favor of commercial space, the role of commercial space. Because, you ask the question, what should we do? It’s clear that robot rovers are less expensive than human beings in terms of sending to Mars. But, on the other hand, I think it’s essential that human beings have a presence in space. That, actually, I could imagine in 300 years, that depending on how things go, if we make it through climate change, this is the prize for making it through climate change, that we could have hundreds of millions of people living in space. I think that’s really important-

Preet Bharara:

Wait, in only 300 years?

Adam Frank:

Yeah. Sure.

Preet Bharara:

All right. We’re going to get to that. We got to get to that next. Because, I’ve seen some of your writings on this. I guess the possibilities are you have a freestanding domicile, a space station. You plant a colony on the moon or on Mars or some other place, all of which have lots of obstacles and challenges of an extraordinary nature. Then you have suggested some other way, and maybe you could spend a minute talking about it because it sounds fantastical. Maybe we make new homes inside of asteroids. Not on them, but inside them. Professor, discuss.

Adam Frank:

Well, first of all, there’s this show called The Expanse, which is based on some books, which I don’t know if you’ve seen, but I recommend it. It is the greatest science fiction show ever made. One of the reasons is because it’s so scientifically accurate, takes place about 300 years from now. That’s an idea that they played around with and other science fiction writers have played around with. Because, asteroids are these giant mountains. They’re flying mountains. The idea is why try and drop down a gravity well like Mars, which it costs money to not crash on it, and then it costs money to get out of it in terms of fuel.

Take one of these asteroids, hollow the inside out, and then spin it up. Then you get a giant rotating mountain. And then, you can live on the inside. Because, if you’ve ever been on one of those amusement park rides where the room spins and the floor drops away, the centrifugal force, you can have what we call spin gravity. What we calculate… We did a whole calculation on this about how you might be able to do this. What we found is, even a small asteroid, an asteroid that was… if I remember, I think maybe 10 kilometers across in diameter. You could basically turn into a rotating space habitat that would have the same area as Manhattan. How many people live in Manhattan?

This is tech 300 years… Think about tech 200 years ago. 200 years ago, when Jane Austen novels, everybody’s wearing stove pipe hats. Nobody had traveled faster than 40 miles an hour, 50 miles an hour, maybe 80 miles an hour. And, that was when they were falling to their death off a cliff. Because, trains hadn’t been invented. Now, we-

Preet Bharara:

I mean, the iPhone didn’t come out till like 1815 or something like that, right?

Adam Frank:

That’s right. Yeah. I saw a tweet about that. One of the first tweets was 1850. What’s remarkable is that now all of us are like, yeah, we travel 500 miles an hour sitting down five miles in the sky and we don’t even think about it. So, the idea that 300 years from now we could have a solar system that is colonized, that is settled, that there are millions of people, hundreds of millions, living on Mars, in basically every nook and cranny that we can find to live in the solar system, I think it would be useful if we did that. I think it’s-

Preet Bharara:

It would be useful? Why? Some people will say… I don’t mean to keep going back to this.

Adam Frank:

Sure. This is-

Preet Bharara:

This pragmatic question of allocation of resources. But, resources are finite. That’s why we didn’t put a submersible on the moon of Saturn. If you have trillions of dollars to spend, and the idea is to have something sustainable and also learn from it, is that money better spent on the long shot prospect of housing people off the planet or on fixing the planet vis-a-vis us? And, finding other places, whether it’s underwater or in places that are uninhabitable to our mind now? In other words, the most uninhabitable place on Earth. I don’t know what you would pick as options for that, has got to be easier to build a village on than Mars.

Adam Frank:

Yes, that’s absolutely true.

Preet Bharara:

Why aren’t we doing that?

Adam Frank:

Well, if I could just wind it back a little bit. This is not going to be done because governments are going to put the money into it solely. This is why commercial-

Preet Bharara:

Is it going to be freaking Bezos again?

Adam Frank:

Well, I mean, those guys will get us started. They’re the ones who launched it. But, really what they did is they created… They started the space economy. There are now lots of space startups. There are lots of companies in all kinds of different ways, figuring out how to get stuff into space way more cheaply than NASA did. That’s the essence. Because, the low earth orbit is worth billions and billions of dollars. When you think about all the satellite communications, everything that happens in the low earth orbit, it’s already a scwazillion dollar economy.

What will happen is that government will lead the way, commercial will follow it, and eventually there’s reasons to be up there. We’re not going to go up there because the government’s only spent the money. It’s because eventually there will be jobs and wealth to be created. The reason why it’s important to me, I think, is for human flourishing. Because, every one of those asteroid colonies or asteroid settlements could be a different experiment in democracy or whatever you wanted. Maybe somebody… There’s going to be a Mormon space.

Preet Bharara:

Or, anarchy, Professor.

Adam Frank:

Or, anarchy. Well, which kind of anarchy are we talking about?

Preet Bharara:

That’s how the movies all turn out. They begin as democracies and then-

Adam Frank:

And then, they… Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

And then, there’s that frame in the movie, 47 years later.

Adam Frank:

It’s a smoking ruin.

Preet Bharara:

Welcome to dystopia.

Adam Frank:

But, actually, a lot of those movies and the ending ending is the people have risen and they’ve overthrown the tyrannical overlord and yay. But, I really do think that what’s interesting is that each one of those settlements will be far enough away from everybody else that you really could experiment with social forms in ways that could be very useful. That’s why I see this is important for human flourishing over the long term. As an astronomer, my job is to think in the long term.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Adam Frank after this. You issued a very important caveat when we were talking about these colonies that we’re going to build. I’m excited about that. On asteroids in the universe, if we get through climate change.

Adam Frank:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

Are we going to do that, or are we not going to do that?

Adam Frank:

It depends on what day you talk to me. This week, I got to tell you-

Preet Bharara:

We’re recording this on Monday.

Adam Frank:

Yeah. Last week, I was pretty bummed. I got to tell you, I was in a really dark place.

Preet Bharara:

Were you in Rome where it was 107?

Adam Frank:

Yeah. No, I was in Rochester where it had just been… I couldn’t go outside the week beforehand or whatever because of the smoke from the fires in Ontario.

Preet Bharara:

The other R City. Yeah.

Adam Frank:

Yes. Right. Equal to Rome in so many ways.

Preet Bharara:

Well, Professor, that doesn’t seem very scientific of you if your answer is different depending on the day of the week.

Adam Frank:

Well, that’s because this is about the human future. The human future is very much dependent on the choices we make and how we respond to the pressures and problems that our own technologies have driven. Now, in general, I’m hopeful because what’s the alternative? I think we’re going to have a hard time for a while. I think these next few decades, even centuries, they-

Preet Bharara:

These extreme events.

Adam Frank:

These extreme events. But, I do think you’re going to get to a point where the climate has got… You’re going to start to see mass deaths. I think, at that point, this is how governments fall. Governments fall when there are breadlines. And, climate’s going to drive us there. We’re already… I mean, it’s too late to have the planet that you and I grew up in. But, it’s still… There’s going to be a future. And, the Earth also… I always want to point this out. The Earth is going to be fine.

Preet Bharara:

No, this is a very important point. It’s a very important point. When people say things like, and I hear this all the time, let’s save Earth. Earth is totally fine. It’s the people who are in trouble, as you say.

Adam Frank:

That is what it is. What people need to understand is that Earth is not like a little fragile bunny. Earth is basically… It’s a God. There’s a reason why people… Or, a goddess. People worshiped Earth as a goddess for a reason. It really is because it literally channels cosmic power, and that’s the sun. There is so much energy flowing through the Earth systems at any one time that there is nothing we can do to it that would end life on Earth. The biosphere is so much more powerful than we are. Our job is not to save the Earth. Our job is to not piss it off, if you want to put it that way, or make it angry.

Preet Bharara:

Even the most expansive, worst case scenario, thermonuclear war, Earth survives.

Adam Frank:

Earth survives and life goes on without us. But, life will definitely go on. I mean, Earth has been through far worse than we’re going to be able to exert on it. It’ll be a different planet, but it’ll be full of life. But, we… That’s what you have to understand. It’s not about saving the Earth. It’s about saving this society, this culture that we all depend on, that the 8 billion people on the planet right now depend on for life. Because, if the climate changes enough, then this kind of society will simply not be able to function. You won’t be able to have a large scale agriculture. You won’t be able to have large scale trade, and the consequences will be a lot of suffering for a lot of people.

Preet Bharara:

This is a variation on a question I asked a minute ago, and it’s going back to the idea of how governments, and obviously there are private actors now in increasing numbers, but governments still more likely have the wherewithal to get us on a path of a certain broad-based exploration and march on scientific discovery. Let’s say I’m a senator in the United States and I want to make a pitch for more and more spending with respect to some of these issues that you and I have been discussing. What is the argument I make to the public when we have so many other problems and homelessness and income inequality and poverty? What is the argument that I make to say we want to double NASA’s budget or triple the amount of money we’re spending on a telescope program or other such thing for average people?

Adam Frank:

That’s a great question. I mean, there’s a couple of different ways to do it. One is, there was a famous hearing where a senator asked a scientist, “Why should we spend this money on science rather than the defense?” The scientist said, “Because it makes the country worth defending.” A thousand years from now, every politician who’s alive today will be entirely forgotten. Even the ones you like the most and the ones you hate the most. What will be remembered is that it was the United States that discovered… that led the charge in terms of going to the moon or in terms of discovering exoplanets. There’s a way in which what makes this country great is these achievements that we’re doing. Nobody remembers third century Albania. I’m sorry if you’re Albanian. I don’t mean that. But, there’s lots of places… Certain places stand out.

Preet Bharara:

Well, I’m pretty sure we have nobody from the third century.

Adam Frank:

That’s right. I’m kidding. I don’t know. If you get an email, let me know. That’s, I think, the strongest argument is that this is the wonder, the opening of the human mind that these discoveries lead us to, are so fundamental to being human that the fact that the United States thousands of years now will be remembered for this, I think is one way to talk about it. The other is, you know that thing called the internet? How much is that worth? All those technologies, many of them came from space exploration. The protocols for sending images over the internet were developed in a NASA lab. I could just… Cell phones. There would be no cell phones if it wasn’t for the activity of the space program. The ROI on these kinds of blue sky things-

Preet Bharara:

Big ROI. But, the problem is you just don’t know which thing is going to bring you the ROI.

Adam Frank:

Right. Exactly. But, almost all of them do. I mean, most of this stuff finds its way. When you have to solve some incredibly hard technological problem for some obscure reason in science, that technology ends up… It finds a home.

Preet Bharara:

Well, the biggest one you didn’t mention, space ice cream.

Adam Frank:

Yeah, that was it. The spacewhich. Remember as a kid, you had the space ice cream? And then, what was it? There was the other [inaudible 00:46:55]

Preet Bharara:

My kids love that. At the Museum of Natural History in DC, you would get that space ice cream. Look, I think that was worth a trillion.

Adam Frank:

For sure.

Preet Bharara:

Probably about a trillion. Let me ask about another threat. I don’t know if this is in your expertise, but it occurred to me as you were speaking. The possibility of a disastrous, for humans at least, not to the planet as we’ve been discussing, disastrous asteroid hit like the kind that destroyed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. What is your state of being sanguine or not sanguine that we can handle that?

Adam Frank:

That’s a great question.

Preet Bharara:

And, we’ll detect it on time.

Adam Frank:

Yeah. That one, we totally can do that. We’ve already shown that the DART-

Preet Bharara:

We totally can do that?

Adam Frank:

Totally can do that. Absolutely. I mean, the DART mission that we did last year, that was the coolest thing ever, where we just basically threw a heavy spaceship at the asteroid. We changed its orbit. That orbit has been changed by even that little impact. We don’t have… If it happened tomorrow, we’d be in deep trouble. But, within… We’re developing the technologies now. Within probably 50 years or so, we’d have enough to… The thing is early detection. Because, if you detect it early enough, all you got to do is go like ping and you can divert its orbit so it doesn’t hit Earth. But, yeah, I think that’s not going to be a problem.

Preet Bharara:

Without using nukes. Because, all the movies, you use nukes.

Adam Frank:

Big mistake with the nukes. You don’t want to use the nukes. Because, in general, the nukes are going to fragment the thing and you don’t want a whole bunch of fragments. Yeah, try and avoid the nukes.

Preet Bharara:

While I have you, if you had to pick, Armageddon or Deep Impact?

Adam Frank:

Deep Impact. Deep Impact.

Preet Bharara:

Really?

Adam Frank:

Yeah. I know everybody loves Armageddon. I mean, all those great scenes and the music-

Preet Bharara:

Well, Deep Impact didn’t have the oil rig drillers.

Adam Frank:

Exactly. Yeah. I mean, I like Deep Impact because… What is it? It’s Michael Bay, right? Not Deep Impact, I mean Armageddon.

Preet Bharara:

No. It’s Mimi Leder.

Adam Frank:

Mimi Leder did… Not… No. Yeah, right. But, she was Deep Impact. Armageddon was Michael Bay.

Preet Bharara:

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Adam Frank:

Michael Bay, explosions. It was all great. But, in terms of just being a compelling movie, I love the scene in Deep Impact when the ocean, when they’re standing in front of the ocean and the tidal wave comes and wipes them out. That was awesome.

Preet Bharara:

To me, it’s a serious question. My friend and former colleague, Lisa Monaco, when she was working in the Obama White House and she was overseeing various things, including responses to terrorism, one of the things in her portfolio was… I don’t know what the name of it was, threats from asteroids. When I checked in with her from time to time, I’m like, “Look, I know you got terrorism under Control, AQAP, Al-Qaeda, et cetera. What’s the update on the asteroids?”

Adam Frank:

Space rocks.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Those other things are not as existential as the asteroid.

Adam Frank:

That’s the problem. I mean, the asteroid, it’s a low probability event that wipes you out entirely. This is the interesting thing about our advance as a species. This is really… We’re at such an interesting moment, and this is why actually the study of intelligent civilizations become so relevant right now. Because, we clearly have capacities that could allow us to become eternal in some sense as a species.

Preet Bharara:

Going back to AI, again?

Adam Frank:

No, not even AI. Think just purely biological, we have the capacity to keep ourselves from being wiped out by asteroids, which took out the dinosaurs. Dinosaurs were around for a long time, and they got wiped out by an asteroid. We probably will have the capacity at some point to send ships to other stars. We’re almost at the edge of being able to be functionally immortal as a species, just to go on, to continue to expand and develop ourselves. Yet we’re also at the precipice of wiping ourselves out in multiple ways, AI, nuclear war and climate change. Understanding if anybody else has made it, is there any species that got to our point and navigated these challenges? That, I think, is one of the most compelling questions about why you want to think about other civilizations.

Preet Bharara:

Speaking of other civilizations, to me, one of the most interesting things that you’ve written about is this question that is posed in some religions, in some religious texts, about the possibility given how long the Earth has been around and how many revolutions have taken place with respect to the Earth and its makeup and ice ages and all sorts of other things, is it possible that there was a civilization, intelligent civilization before ours in the distant past? And, the distant past, not that distant when you’re talking about a 4 billion year old planet?

Adam Frank:

This was a paper I wrote with Gavin Schmidt, who’s the head of Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which is a NASA climate installation. We wrote this paper because, it’s not so much that we really thought there would be one, but we wanted to know how would you know. How would you know? And, this question is-

Preet Bharara:

It’s a bit of a lawyerly exercise, which is one of the reasons I like it.

Adam Frank:

It was very much a lawyerly exercise. We wanted to know just… Because, people argue about this. But, the question is, is there any way you could tell? Because, after about… It turns out that after about a couple of million years, the surface, the Earth’s surface, is pretty much entirely wiped out and rebuilt because of tectonic activity. So, you’re never going to find like Planet of the Apes, kind of like subway tubes full from the previous civilization.

Preet Bharara:

Or, the top of the Statue of liberty.

Adam Frank:

Right.

Preet Bharara:

Because, one of the things you write is that our sophisticated civilization, if it were to end tomorrow, I think you write this, that a hundred million years in the future, it would take a hundred million years into the future before all traces of it would be wiped out to future inspecting eyeballs. If that’s true going to the future, and maybe I misquoted you…

Adam Frank:

It’s a little bit early. It’s even a few million actually.

Preet Bharara:

Even a few million. How do we not know that between the dinosaurs and us, there were reptilian humanoid types?

Adam Frank:

The answer is we don’t. Right? I mean, we don’t have any way. That’s what, in the paper, we tried to work out. How would you even tell? Again, we weren’t saying there was. We’re just saying…

Preet Bharara:

Although, we know about the dinosaurs. Actually, now I’m confusing myself because we do know about the dinosaurs, and that was 65 million years ago at the end.

Adam Frank:

Right. But, we know about that-

Preet Bharara:

How were they preserved? Fossils.

Adam Frank:

The thing about fossils is fossils are very rare. Most stuff doesn’t fossilize. If you had a civilization that lasted say 10,000 years, which is a long time compared to us. If you had a technological civilization building iPhones that lasted 10,000 years, 10,000 years is so short geologically that there’d be no fossils. Nothing of that in such a short geological time would be fossilized. That’s the problem. The reason why we have dinosaur fossils is because the dinosaurs were around for 65 million years. So, one out of every scwazillion dinosaur fell into a mud puddle and got fossilized. That’s just not going to happen with a technological civilization unless it was super long-lived.

What we found is that there were some ways to maybe tell. If nobody’s ever done this study, if you had an industrial civilization for a thousand years, it would change the atmosphere in the ways we’re changing it. It would change… It would lay down some isotopes that you might be able to find in layers, rock layers. What’s funny is, in the end, the paper was… We actually were sort of saying what might somebody… How could somebody tell whether we were here a hundred million years from now? That’s what the quote was. But, it would be hard to separate that out from a natural event. That’s the problem. Because, we found some things in the record 50 million years ago or so that kind of looked like the right signature. But, again, they took place over such long timescales, and there were other things that said, “No, that wasn’t a civilization.”

Preet Bharara:

The other interesting thing about what you write is, if we do, to borrow your phrase, get through climate change, and our society and our civilization becomes more sustainable and we affect the atmosphere less and we affect the land and the oceans less, we’ll be less detectable in the future. Is that a great cosmic irony?

Adam Frank:

It is an irony. But, you know what? I changed my mind. Is that okay?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Adam Frank:

Since I wrote that paper-

Preet Bharara:

You’re allowed.

Adam Frank:

… I have thought about it a lot. I think now-

Preet Bharara:

I think that’s allowed in science.

Adam Frank:

Yes. Nowhere else. Actually, that is the beauty of it. I don’t know if this works in law, but the beauty of science is that science shows you how and when to change your mind. I think that is the most… Especially in this polarized era where to change your mind is some sort of weakness.

Preet Bharara:

Hypocrisy, Professor.

Adam Frank:

Right. But, to actually… That’s a beautiful thing about science. It gives you a way that everybody would be like, “Yay, you changed your mind. You followed the rules of science.”

Preet Bharara:

What did you change your mind about?

Adam Frank:

I changed my mind because if you really became a sustainable technological civilization, a high tech technological civilization, I think what would happen is all boats would rise. In the meaning that you would get your biosphere to become even more productive and more diverse, while your technosphere was also becoming more productive and more diverse. I think that would actually leave imprints on the planet. You might not pollute, but you might change your forests so that they’re producing photo electricity. You might genetically engineer your forests so that the entire forest becomes a power plant. That would have signatures that I think you’d be able to see from a distance.

Preet Bharara:

I have a more profound question for you.

Adam Frank:

Okay.

Preet Bharara:

How can religion and science coexist, generally speaking, but in particular, as you’ve been talking about evolution and about how small we are, those things come into conflict with lots of religious views, religious worldviews. It’s not a real question other than to have you… I want you to opine on the intersection of religion and science.

Adam Frank:

Yeah. Well, that was actually the first book I wrote was The Constant Fire Beyond the Science versus Religion Debate. Because, actually, I don’t think the impulse to a spiritual life and science are at all incompatible. I, myself, am a zen Buddhist. I’ve been staring at a wall for 30 years. And, it’s pretty boring, I’ll tell you, at least in the beginning. But, what I tried to show in that book was that, forget about the dogma and the doctrines, the impulse to a spiritual life begins with experience, the experience of awe and wonder, which leads us to a sense of sacredness, that somehow there’s something going on in the world that is more than just us and more than just our words that we use to describe.

I think that’s also where science begins. There’s a great word, horophony, which is the emergence into experience of sacredness. There’s an epiphany and a horophony. I think we all have that experience of horophonies. Maybe you’re looking at a sunset, your kid’s born, or you’re doing the dishes, and all of a sudden that moment of like, “Ooh, there’s just… The world is extraordinary.” When we break through our day to day. I think that’s the root of both science and spiritual endeavor as I called it, whether it gets expressed through a formal religion or whether it’s expressed in other ways. I think that’s really the root.

Preet Bharara:

But, why is there so much conflict over time? Is that the fault of religion or the fault of science?

Adam Frank:

It’s the fault of fundamentalism. If you look at the history of Christianity, there’s been a-

Preet Bharara:

Galileo didn’t fare so well.

Adam Frank:

That’s true. Yes. That’s a good example of… I think maybe, there, you might say politics. I think there, because it’s about power and control. The Catholic church was… If Galileo had shown up 300 years earlier, it might’ve been a different story. But, the church was facing the reformation so it needed to squash heresies. It was protecting its own power. A lot of this is the way that spiritual endeavor, this impulse that I think many of us have, gets expressed as a political organization. That’s where the problem is.

Preet Bharara:

Part of the other issue is, I assume, but I’m not a scholar of such things, that the original determination that we were the center of the universe such as it is, and the sun and the planets revolved around us is sort of baseline arrogance about how important and central to the universe people are, human beings are. The more exoplanets you discover, you and your colleagues discover, and the more you can determine how many there are and how far they go, the less significant we seem.

Adam Frank:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

You also talk about an important concept that’s both a religious concept, a philosophical concept, scientific concept, I guess, is meaning. As these discoveries keep getting propounded and science keeps expanding, like the universe, what are we to understand about where there’s meaning?

Adam Frank:

Well, I think there’s really a very interesting thing happening in science right now, which is that the information theory which is at the core of so many of our technologies and the understanding of life, I think there’s kind of a revolution going on in the understanding of life. Or, it’s just beginning, where actually we’re going to kind of undo the Copernican Revolution in a certain way, and we’re going to understand that, yes, the universe is vast and we’re just a small part of it. Yet, at the same time, we can’t tell the story of the universe scientifically without including us. This is the lesson I believe of quantum mechanics, like all the stuff that happens with quantum mechanics, that really we are actually central and meaning because we’re there. Meaning is actually central to the universe. Because, you can’t-

Preet Bharara:

So, anything that is observed by a particular party, whether that’s a human or a giraffe or an ant, that observer is central to the enterprise? Am I understanding that correctly?

Adam Frank:

Yes. I would go even deeper than that. One of the flaws of the way we think about minds, and this actually could lead us to AI if we wanted to go there, is that like, oh, your mind is just in your head. You’re just a meat computer. I think there’s a big pushback.

Preet Bharara:

Never heard that term before.

Adam Frank:

Trademark.

Preet Bharara:

Meat computer.

Adam Frank:

Meat computer. That’s the way… That’s this idea of reductionism in science. Science has been dominated by what we would call reductionist philosophical views. That like, “Oh, if you know everything about the quarks, that’s it. You’re done. You can just build up from there. Everything else is just a consequence of the quarks.” I think there’s emerging in science, a very different view, which would say that your mind is not just in your head. You’re actually an ecosystem of minds and of life. You wouldn’t be here without all the other life. You wouldn’t be here without all the other minds, which gave you language, which taught you language.

It’s not like we’re all just running around with little chips in our head, and we’re just locked into our heads. There’s a broader view, which is that, actually, we’re indelibly woven into this network, this infinitely complex network that is all of life, that is the entire history of the planet. Which, therefore, is also the entire history of the solar system. Which is, therefore… So, I think there’s a very different view emerging. We have a book coming out next year in the winter, me and a philosopher and another physicist, called The Blind Spot, where we try and unpack these views. We think there’s a very different way of viewing science that will also be very helpful to us, to steer us away from climate change. A different view of life and Earth that understands that idea, the balance between significance and insignificance.

Preet Bharara:

Look, I think one important element of people’s understanding outside of the religious context is to have people who are like you, professor of astrophysics, deeply embedded in the scientific world. But, you come on podcasts. You do interviews. You write books for popular consumption, not just for your fellow scientists. Do you wish there were more people in the world of science doing that?

Adam Frank:

You know what’s interesting about the new generation is that there are lots doing that. When I was coming up-

Preet Bharara:

Oh, are there too many?

Adam Frank:

No, no. The more the merrier. I mean, people-

Preet Bharara:

Does everyone want to be Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is that what’s going on?

Adam Frank:

Everybody should be Neil deGrasse Tyson. Going out into schools and libraries and [inaudible 01:02:39] halls, everywhere. And, explaining, showing people these amazing pictures or the animations of what’s going on in your cell right now, the insane molecular shenanigans in your cells right now. That can only be a good thing. Again, it’s about awe and wonder and the sense that life is so much more than just our opinions and our arguments. I think that’s actually a great thing. When I was coming up, there was only Carl Sagan. I remember one of my professors making fun of Carl Sagan, who is my hero. I was like, “Why are you doing that?” It was seemed like popularization was seen to be beneath a scientist. But, now, this generation-

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s silly. I have quoted recently at length from Carl Sagan who, on top of being a brilliant scientist, was just a beautiful writer.

Adam Frank:

Yeah, yeah. Truly. Saint Carl as I like to say. He was really-

Preet Bharara:

Saint Carl.

Adam Frank:

He was incredible. I think there’s a lot happening now. I advise a lot of students who are starting their own podcasts or they’re doing beautiful YouTube video explainers. Hopefully, there’s an audience for it.

Preet Bharara:

Professor Adam Frank, thank you so much for joining us.

Adam Frank:

It was a great pleasure. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Preet Bharara:

And, the book coming soon, The Little Book of Aliens. My conversation with Adam Frank continues for members of the Cafe Insider Community. In the bonus for insiders, we speak about the discovery of cosmic waves that are rippling through space, time, and even through you.

Adam Frank:

Every movement. When you wave your hand, you’re creating gravitational waves so that there’s like this city din. Like if you’re walking through a city, you hear all the jackhammers and the people yelling at each other and the car horns, it creates a din. This is a din or a hum from the entire universe, not just now, but throughout its entire history.

Preet Bharara:

The insider membership is now 40% off for the first year. To sign up, head to cafe.com/insider and use discount code justice. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider discount code justice.

BUTTON

Preet Bharara:

Before we end the show this week, I want to talk about an important person in history, Emmett Till. If he were alive, Emmett would’ve celebrated his 82nd birthday this past Tuesday, July 25th. Instead, we remember Emmett Till and his brutal murder as one of the most salient events in US history that invigorated the Civil Rights movement. His story should be familiar.

In 1955, Emmett a 14-year-old Black boy was kidnapped and lynched by two white men after a white woman accused him of harassment at a grocery store in Money, Mississippi. Emmett’s mutilated body was found three days later in the Tallahatchie River. At his funeral, Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, had an open casket so people could see with their own horrified eyes what had happened to her son. Emmett’s gruesome murder and the subsequent reaction to it reflected the harsh reality of what it meant to be a Black American, especially in the Jim Crow South.

Emmett’s killers were never held to account. But, what happened to him will not be forgotten. Today, we find meaningful ways to honor Emmett Till and remind our country the lessons his death taught us. On Emmett’s birthday this week, President Biden announced the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument to honor the legacies of Emmett Till and his mother. The monument will include three protected sites. One in Illinois where Emmett was born and where his funeral was held, and the other two in Mississippi where he was murdered. At the commemoration ceremony, President Biden said this.

Joe Biden:

While darkness and denialism can hide much, they erase nothing. They can hide, but they erase nothing. We can’t just choose to learn what we want to know. We have to learn what we should know. We should know about our country. We should know everything, the good, the bad, the truth of who we are as a nation.

Preet Bharara:

In 2022, Biden also signed the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act into law, finally making lynching a federal hate crime. As we reflect on Emmett’s death 68 years later, it’s clear that the work is far from finished. Just last week, Florida’s Board of Education approved its 2023 social studies curriculum, which includes lessons on the personal benefits of slavery. This is just one of many incidents that highlight the importance of discussing and calling out racism wherever we find it, yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Professor Adam Frank. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at Preet Bharara with the #AskPreet. Or, you can call and leave me a message at 6692477338. That’s 66924 Preet. Or, you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The senior producers are Adam Waller and Matthew Billy. The Cafe Team is David Kurlander, Noa Azulai, Nat Wiener, Jake Kaplan, Namita Shah, and Claudia Hernández. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.