 All right, hi, everyone. My name's Sonanda. I'm a PhD student here at the Media Lab in the Mediated Matter Group. My background's in biology, and I've become really, really fascinated with astrobiology and life in space, so I'm very pumped for our panel. We have some really great panelists here. Thank you so much for being here, and thank you to the audience for being here as well. So I thought we would start with just introductions, so if you could go through one by one and just say your name and what you're interested in right now. Great. My name is Max Teckmark. I'm a professor here at MIT doing research in artificial intelligence and physics. And so dedicated to this panel. Actually, I was doing a physics experiment on the interaction effects between Earth's gravitational field and very low-friction environments, and seriously, I broke my leg just for this panel so I could demonstrate applications of human adaptability. Incredible commitment. Yeah. I'm very excited and honored to be on this because I spent a lot of time thinking about not just our technology today, but what opportunities it opens up for us in the future. Yeah. What better panel to discuss this than with all of you. I'm Julie Huber. I'm maybe the only oceanographer here. I study single cell life at the bottom of the ocean and beneath the sea floor, so I'm really interested in kind of how our oceans work in the dark, so life without the sun. And NASA has been a wonderful supporter of our research for the last 20 years, actually, thinking not only about origins and evolution of life, you know, three and a half billion years ago on this planet, but also the technology that we use in the deep ocean. I always say if you can't get it to work a mile beneath the surface, you're going to have a little bit of trouble out there. And most recently, thinking a lot about ocean worlds, especially Europa and Celadus, being involved in some of those missions, thinking about how to look for evidence of life in other oceans. And my name is Paul Harwitz. I'm a professor or retired professor, washed up professor at Harvard. I love building gadgets. I love electronics, but my latest obsession, latest being for several decades now, is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence using the radio telescopes or optical telescopes and have more to say about that, I think, during the panel. My name is Lynn Rothschild. I'm a scientist at NASA. Everyone else is dancing around it. I actually do work for NASA, don't have any MIT degrees, but I do wear two hats. There one is an astrobiologist. My background is in evolutionary biology and protostology like Julie. And so I spent most of my career looking at life in extreme environments on the Earth as analogs for the envelope for life elsewhere. And then about 12 years ago, I was asked to start a program in synthetic biology for NASA. So I now do an awful lot of that, trying to use engineering and rearranging and recreating life as a way to give us new technologies that will enable human exploration and discoveries that we can't do any other way. Cool. Thank you so much. So I think today we'll just have a really casual conversation, and at the end, we'll have 10 minutes for questions from the audience as well. But hopefully I cover some of the things you guys are thinking about, too. So the first question that I had when I was asking people like, hey, I'm moderating this panel. What's the first question you want to ask was, is there life in space? Why do you think so? And why not? Well, of course, there's life there, because we've got stuff orbiting the Earth. I think there are humans, maybe? Some sort of multicellular creatures. But beyond that, if our idea is about the origin and evolution of life, that's correct, that it's a combinatorial chemistry problem. And we have a pretty good idea of what you do once life evolves. But if you can actually get the origin of life, and again, we have lots of ideas, although we've never actually done it in the lab, we know it's possible because it happened on planet Earth. We know roughly what the conditions are, and we know that there must be many other places in the universe that have these sorts of conditions, that if it is a combinatorial chemistry problem and a statistical problem, surely it must have arisen elsewhere. And if not, then there's something seriously wrong about our scientific conceptions of what the origin of life took. Maybe I'd make a friendly amendment to that, which is, not only did it arise on Earth, it arose early. Almost as soon as it could have, oh, should it had formed after the late bombardment and all that kind of stuff. Although I don't know how you feel about it, but I think probably most of us in the panel throw out numbers like four billion years and three billion years like you talk about what you had for breakfast. And then you go home and you think that's a really, really long period of time. And so when people say, oh, it was very quick, you'd need at least 10 million years. And you say, oh yeah, 10 million is very short. Then you go home again and think 10 million is still a really, really long period of time. So I think a lot about life in our solar system, because I think that's the most testable hypothesis in the next 30 years. We now know that planets that don't have plate tectonics like Earth can still have tidal friction and volcanism and things like that. We know that planets can have rocky cores. We know that they can have oceans. And to me, the next question is, can those planets and moons support life? And I can't wait to get underneath those icy shells into those oceans. I think there's a very high probability that if indeed there is volcanism and water and oxidants that they will be able to support single cell life. And I always stop at single cell life because that's all I know about within our solar system. I think the question of how common single cell life is, it's fascinating. I'm totally open to the idea that that's fairly common out there. But I wanna ask the question which excites me the most, which is how rare is actually life at our level? It took us, life that can build its own technology and really take off. It took a long time for us to invent the internet, 4.5 billion years, right? Dinosaurs stomped around here for over 100 billion years without even getting a single router. And so it's not obvious that there aren't some major very unlikely roblox along the way and you asked if there's life out there in space? Well, the best and most accepted theory we have, what made our space, the theory of cosmological inflation, predicted space is infinite, randomly filled with stuff. So if that theory is true, then of course there's life somewhere. The question is, how far away is the nearest neighbor? Is it within what we call our observable universe? Or our universe for short? The region from which light has reached us during the 13.8 billion years since our big bang? If it's farther than that, then for all practical purposes, we're alone. And I'm actually in the minority view here, for truth and advertising, who thinks that we should be open to the possibility that we are actually the only life with telescopes in our observable universe. To say a couple of words of why I'm guessing that, if you multiply together all these unknown probabilities from combinatorial chemistry and the probability of getting beyond the dinosaur kind of life into life like you guys in the media lab would rent stuff and think about space, you get a very uncertain probability. It could be 10 to the minus 10, it could be 10 to the minus 20, it could be 10 to the minus 30, it could be what. So you have almost a uniform distribution in the exponent of your uncertainty and if you just propagate that into the probability distribution for the distance to your nearest neighbor, of course you're going to again get this equally likely that it's 10 to the 10 meters away, 10 to the 20 meters away, 10 to the 30 meters away, 10 to the 40, 10 to the 50, 10 to the 60. And then you go and look at the data. Well, if it's beyond 10 to the 26 meters away, that's outside of our observable universe. If it's much, much less than say 10 to the 16 meters away, we would have easily seen it already. So there's only a small number of orders of magnitude actually that it has to fall within for us to not have seen it trivially and for us to never see it. And I think if I were just betting our guess that it's probably not in that range, which means that we have an incredible responsibility to not blow it on this planet and have these kind of conversations and think, how can we do it right? I think it's a very seductive methodology. It is a Star Trek picture that we can screw up and mess up the climate and or have an accidental nuclear war or whatever. It's okay because there are all these friendly aliens that are going to come and bail us out if we mess up. I don't think we should drink that Kool-Aid. I think we should really say, hey, there is a real possibility that one day much of our cosmos will be teeming with life. And it's because of what we do here now. So let's really be open to the possibility that it is up to us. And work hard to make the best of it. Can I agree with the last point, which is we shouldn't screw it up, but disagree violently with your first point. You said, well, there's only 10 orders of magnitude in range between this and that. Well, of course, 10 orders of magnitude in range is 30 orders of magnitude in volume, right? You've got to keep this. And the other thing is, look, we now know there's as many planets as Star. So we have 10 to the 11th in our galaxy. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Four times 10 to the 11th, but we've got four. We have 10 to the 12th galaxies. You've got 10 to the 20. What about up to a 10 to the 25, 10 to the 23? It doesn't really matter with that number. And we're the only one. We one chance in 10 to the 23. I think a hypothesis that it's one in 10 to the 23 has a chance of 10 to the minus 23 of being correct. Well, it's the only number in town. If I can push back a little bit on that, so I'm all with you on all those exponents and the numbers, they're all right. And but, you know, you really want to take a uniform distribution of this probably not uniform distribution from zero to one. You want to have it uniform in the log, right? So because whenever you do combinatorics, it's very easy to get 10 to the minus 100 or 10 to the minus 1000, these kind of numbers. There are many, many different things we have very little clue about. We don't know how likely it is to just get the ribosome going. There are many things that could be a roadblock. And and also at the level of higher intelligence again. And and also there's the Fermi paradox, which we really can't neglect. But if it really were that easy, there are you. So your argument can in a way be used to turn around against you here because you can say, hey, we know there are billions of planets, even in the Milky Way, they're very Earth like and formed over a billion years before us. So so why haven't we heard from any of those? Maybe they're all those Buddhist monks sitting there meditating in, play video games and don't want to communicate with us. But all one billion of them. Yeah, I feel like you're conflating a whole lot of things into one sentence here. I can say this because I'm three people away from here. But I can beat you. But I know I know more than I bargained for. You know, I know for a fact, these steady people define intelligence as the ability to build a radio transmitter. And I've told Sesh Shostak many times that I'm happy to admit that I am not an intelligent creature. And you know, I and so I believe that you conflated with what I said about the origin of life with finding people who could build a radio transmitter. Now that being said, once you have life, which is the big jump. And I think that's something the general public doesn't realize that the big leap is between non-life and life. Once you have life, we've had multiple routes in the history of life on Earth to go to intelligence. Now, whether all those intelligence, whether the average squid really wanted to turn on its radio or not, it's another matter. But we have lots of examples of that, whether you have a ribosome or not in another planet, whether you even have RNA, I would argue that you probably don't, but you probably have proteins because that's what's out there. So, you know, we may not have aliens out there that are creatures, beings that we're communicating with, you know, radio signals and asking how they like the latest episode of I Love Loosens. But that doesn't mean that there isn't life there. And that's what I'm very interested in. So, how is your detect life that's of different levels? So, Julie talked about... So, I'm going to say one little thing before we move on from this. Okay. Bring some closure because I think we're mainly arguing a little bit about definitions. I'm certainly not some sort of anthropocentric snob saying that only we should count it as smart in some sort of moral sense. I'm not arguing either that I'm sure that we're alone. I'm arguing for humility. I'm just arguing for that we should be open to the idea that we are the only planet in this observable universe with telescopes. And that's important because if we're the only one who can even see these galaxies, you know, it's only because of us that they're even beautiful, right? They're being experienced at all. And if the squids are very smart, but they're never going to go anywhere, then it might be up to us to see whether more of the space gets settled. So, humility. No, no, no, I didn't say that we were the only. Yeah. I think you guys were talking about humility sort of in different ways. So, about like detecting life of different levels though. So, there's detecting life that's intelligent or has telescopes or radio signals, but how would you detect life that's single-celled on different planets or even in the deep sea? How do you detect that? Yeah. I was going to say talk about humility, you know, climb in a submarine and go to the bottom of the ocean. You feel like, you know, a speck of dust and it's a very humbling and wonderful experience, much like we heard from our astronaut earlier. So, there are so many life forms on this planet that only recently we've been able to detect with the advent of many things, including molecular biology and the ability to look at cells at the single life, the ability to have access to environments that we didn't have before through amazing advances in engineering and technology. The challenge, you know, out even just in our solar system is, do we think that life is like us? Is it carbon-based? Does it have nucleic acids? Does it have ribosomes? Things like this. Is it weird life? And we don't have the instruments to detect it. The type of work that Lynn is doing, looking at synthetic life, can we make different types of life and still know how to detect it? Right now, what we've mostly been doing, what NASA has mostly been supporting is looking for Earth-like life using biosignatures. So, not actually the life forms, but looking at the energy that they need, remnants of their biochemistry and things like that. And I think to really push the needle forward, we have to think more like biologists. So what sort of techniques or tools do you think we should start doing now in labs to then further what we're looking for in space? Like how do we expand our definition of what our biosignatures that we should be looking for and what are other types of non-carbon based life forms? How do we start to approach that? Is it through simulation? Is it through different types of experiments? I know you're working on synthetic biology. So how do all these things sort of relate? For a start, and I'm on record saying this many times, that I think carbon-based life is sort of number one. And a lot of things fall from that. And that's not just because there's a lot of carbon in the universe. There is, but we also see carbon chemistry in even the interstellar medium. And I was pointing out, we're seeing on a large silicate rock and we're made of organic carbon. So I think if you start with organic carbon, there are a lot of things that fall from that. But I think at the end of the day, what you're asking yourself is what was asked with the ALH84009. Is there one, is there any other way to create what you see? So, you know, to be a little silly about this, there's a clock on the stage. Is there an abiotic way to create that clock? And if not, if you've really eliminated every other possibility, then there's a good chance that that's a biosignature. And so that's the tricky thing. And that's what has come about with the arguments about the earliest fossils on the earth. Could they be an abiotic remnant? Because the onus is on the person who claims that it's a biosignature. Of course, if you wanted to jump ahead, that could be a postbiotic. Of course, what I'm saying is carbon-based is the first generation and then our second generation or our iPhones and the other silicon-based. But the third generation may be post-us AI displaced from planets, happy in space where there's no gravity and making clocks to the heart's intent and out of cells. But I don't know how that you start that. We've already started. So in the resources that we're using right now and the way that we do missions looking for astrobiological signatures or testing how life survives on ISS missions and things like that, do you think there's new tools that we should specifically be focusing on right now, new things that we should develop so we can get more data faster? Or do you think we're doing a pretty good job as is? Well, I've been arguing in my own community of scientists that we need to start doing our science on the seafloor to help in this NASA-looking forward mission. But it's really, really hard. You know, there's a lot of pressure. There's a lot of water. Stuff doesn't like salt. All these things. But even just most of our science, we are still bringing samples back, especially for biology and doing it in a laboratory. So trying to bring the lab to the seafloor, and that is something that the Mars ethos, especially the Mars missions, have been trying to do. And I think we just need to do more experiments here on Earth to figure out what is the real detection limit? How do we interpret these results? You know, we've been misguided before, but we now know about a lot more extreme environments than we did during the Viking mission, right? And really get into them and try to, you know, open the space of possibility. Well, Julie, you're dancing around, and it's quite right, is the problem with space travel is that it's really expensive. Launching across the Earth's gravity well costs a lot. And so you don't care if you have a piece of equipment in your lab or even on the seafloor that weighs maybe 200 kilograms, and I want it two grams. And that's where a lot of the problems are. We have a lot of really good analytical techniques on the Earth that we have not miniaturized enough to make them reliable. I mean, that's not the only problem with the technology, but that's certainly one of the ones that I'm acutely aware of. Yeah, and another very exciting development that I think is fascinating to see what comes out of is the effort where you look at the composition of the atmospheres of extrasolar planets, right? We have missions at Kepler and now Tess, Sarah Seeger, and many others at MIT where you simply find a planet that's orbiting its host star so that it actually gets in the way of it once per orbit, and during that time, you look very carefully at the absorption spectrum of starlight filtered through the atmosphere, and if you can see there, clear evidence, hey, there is oxygen in this atmosphere, that is a kind of signature where you get that really interesting question. Can you explain that in some way? And the answer is Enceladus. So there is a way to explain it, but you're right, you have to think. But there's more also, you can look for other gases and you can, Sarah, for example, did some really nice work that if you get really good spectrum, you can even start to see it. Even if it's only one dot, you can't resolve it, you can see the rotation frequency of the planet, you can start to see if there's weather on it, you can start to see other structures. We might get some really interesting hints from this, and it's first exciting data we've never had. Looking forward to it. Yeah, I was on a group a couple of years ago at NASA headquarters on massless exploration. I pointed out the only exploration that's truly massless is one that uses spectra. Or sits on the Earth looking for radio signals. True, and then you can still eat your peanut butter sandwich and your chocolate cake. So you talked a little bit about extreme environments on planet Earth. Can you give a little bit of some examples of different extreme environments that exist here, and what we can learn from doing experimentation there that would apply to studying life in space? Yeah, so we've done a lot. So you go through this laundry list. They're extremely high temperature environments. I think the record is about 122 degrees centigrade now, low temperature environments. And then if you're talking about stasis, I mean, we can keep human embryos and liquid nitrogen. So you've got that range there. Huge range of temperature, pH. I've heard people report pH down about negative one or two, but I haven't seen that actually reporting the literature. Well, I stuck a meter under stream in Garagua and I wanna see that published first. But certainly down very close to zero in places like Yellowstone National Park. And then up at about 12 or so in the Rift Valley in Kenya is one of the places we've gone. There's some places in Northern California that also have very high pH environments, close to 12, very high salt. We've worked on organisms that were basically metabolically active and nearly solid salt. The absence of salt is also a problem. I'm trying to think high radiation environments would be considered an extreme environment, whether you're talking about ultraviolet radiation or hard radiation. Now, I know a lot of people are gonna probably laugh at this, but I actually consider high oxygen at an extreme environment. And I would submit that if we weren't all aerobes, if we were anaerobic bacteria, we'd be gasping and saying, I can't believe they're creatures that would live in 21% oxygen. We've got all these backup systems to deal with it. And I'd say that the only reason we don't consider an extreme environment is because we're doing it right now. So I think high oxygen is actually, yeah. And so I've got colleagues who say, oh, we'll find you a planet that's got a lot of oxygen. It's like, actually, that's really dangerous. Most of the evolution of life on earth wasn't an anaerobic earth. So those are some of the ones we talk about a lot. Salt radiation, oxygen temperature, pH, and we have all these analogs on the earth. I thought some of this deep sea stuff is well above 120 degrees centigrade. That was my understanding. Well, the underwater volcanoes are up to 400 degrees. Right, but where there's been living organisms. Evidence of life stops at right around 120. Is that right? Yeah. And in the subsea floor environment, what is that like? Yeah, the subsea floor is actually beneath the sea floor. So within the rocks and the sediment that make up 70% of the surface of our planet, there's actually water moving through them. The whole ocean circulates through it. It's like an aquifer. And in some parts of the ocean, there are those beautiful tube worms and smokers that you see in National Geographic and things. But then there's other parts of the sea floor where cells have been sitting there for maybe thousands of years. Yet somehow they're able to maintain their cell, just kind of like waiting for that piece of carbon to come along or something. And maybe they divide once every 5,000, 10,000 years. And I think that's also really fascinating, this really extreme low energy environment, slow life at the other end of the spectrum, especially as we look for biosignatures on places like Mars, right? Where, you know, who knows what is left behind, but it isn't always gonna be sort of a high energy environment, right? It might be a very low energy environment. Microbes are good across the whole spectrum of that. Yeah, I feel like there's always a lot of questions that I have when I'm reading about astrobiology or life aside from humans, I guess, in other environments, which is just the idea of a life cycle and the idea of space and time in those ways. There may be signals that are being sent, but they're so slow or happen in such, you know, low frequencies that we don't pick them up in a single person's lifetime. And maybe we don't have the continuity required to really get that. Yeah, they're really terrible grad student projects, right? I mean, the cell that has been living alone for, you know, thousands of years and some scientists recently discovered they drilled two and a half kilometers beneath the sea floor into these deep sediments and they found evidence for cells. They could bring them back to life, but there was like one per cubic centimeter. And if you're a micron long, like you have not seen anybody in a really, really long time. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they were able to bring them back up into the lab, keep them under pressure and show that they could basically make methane, which is amazing, right? So it makes it hard to constrain. So there's a lot of modeling, right? Because you're not gonna do these experiments really, but also making these observations in nature and trying to figure out how it works. Interesting. So in terms of the challenges that we currently face, so there's a lot of things that we still need to find out. So could each of you say one area or type of tool that you think we need to really make the next step in terms of searching for life in space or even having humans living in space? How to make that process? So, I mean, I could talk about instrumentation, but I'm not going to. I'm gonna stick with the synthetic biology. And the reason I think that that's particularly important, both for the search for life as well as humans, is that it's an engineering discipline. So I, you know, this is an engineering school. I come from a science background, and this is great, scientists look out in the world and they try to understand what's there. But engineers try to do something new. And so say you're trying to marry the two in your head and you've got an astronomer that comes to you and says that they'd found a perfect planet for life, but the average temperature is 130. And I said, well, the highest temperatures are 120. You know, do you tell them to go back to their room and, you know, cry down the hall and you'd hate to see an astronomer cry and all that? And you say, no, no, no, no, it's okay. Let me see if I can go to my lab and make an organism that'll go to 130. And what that does is it doesn't say that that organism is there, but it says that it's at least possible. And so I think that that's where synthetic biology for the search of life can be extremely important because it allows us to explore the art of the possible right here on the earth. But in terms of human exploration, the other side of the coin, it's also going to allow huge advances in everything from, these are just projects from my own lab, building habitats on Mars with fungal architecture, our architect colleague, Chris Maurers, right there in the front row. So we've had NASA funding for that or we have a satellite mission right now starting to look at having a little ecosystems to power a synthetic biology-enabled Mars colony or an astropharmacy, which we have under review right now. And using DNA actually is the scaffold to build wires one atom thick or cells to actually mine and recycle elements. These are all projects that have been going on in my lab with undergraduate and graduate students. So these are all very much possible in coming online. And again, I think that this is the only way you're going to solve the up mass problem is to use biology as technology to get us off planet. Thank you. I hear that. I will be passing the hat out. Well, my racket is technosignatures, not biosignatures, you know, SETI and its follow-ons. And I think what we've been hampered by mostly is we don't have the tools yet to cover the interesting part of the spectrum, the electromagnetic spectrum that's plausible for this kind of signaling. The, in particular, the infrared, which is a very good place. Space is just as transparent as you need to be. You can form very narrow beams, but the detectors we have now are very primitive and we don't have apertures yet to do that kind of thing. We are right now involved in California in a new setting which we're going to build two bucky balls, each of which has a hundred eyes about this size with a thousand-fold of multipliers behind it. We're going to put this northern and southern California so we get all political stripes involved in this thing. And we're going to look for coincident flashes. But even that's a drop in the bucket from what is probably needed to make contact. So I think we have to ride the exponential of technology, not try to push it past what it can do. And, but it would be nice if we could do it before we all croak. Reasonable. Yeah, I actually, I think the first thing that we need is the ocean scientists need a budget like NASA. We need to understand our oceans now. This idea of humility is really important but also how we study our oceans and what we learn is going to help in this search immensely. So I'd like to see a similar investment. And then I think the power bringing together space scientists, engineers and field scientists, whether they're working in some crazy desert or crazy cave or crazy ocean, is really powerful in designing this tool set to ask that question. I don't think any single discipline can do it. And so things like this, I was actually here a couple months ago for one of these about the ocean. And it would be great just to have it be perfectly half and half because I think the ideas are huge and the possibilities are endless. Right. First of all, I agree with all of the three pictures you guys made here. I would add, I think a big challenge is to persuade the power, our fellow humans on this planet and the powers that be, that we should simply devote a lot more effort to this than we are. You were joking that you would like ocean science to have the same budget as NASA. Well, I would like all of the science. Ocean science probably gets less money in a year than we spend on our military in eight hours by my tech or something like that. And I was just looking at Trump's new budget and much more than half of it is spent on just defending us humans against other humans on this little spinning ball. And the minute part which is actually shrinking is spent on science and trying to do all these cool things. So a little bit more energy and effort going into it, I think could dramatically accelerate what we can do. And there is of course a great deal we can do in addition to all the things that you mentioned already and new astronomical facilities and J.D.A. Boosty opening up in infrared, et cetera, et cetera. I think AI is also gonna be a great helper here in helping us develop more of these technologies we need faster in analyzing a lot of the data better. And even in helping us understand more what we might be looking for. Because connecting with what you said about post biological life, I think it's very important to let go of this idea that you don't share but of course many people who haven't thought about it do that we should be looking for biological beings in the very advanced civilization. When most likely that's a very short phase. We took 4.5 billion years to get the internet here and then from internet to space-faring civilization will probably be relatively quick. And we're on the verge over the most AI researchers in recent surveys think we're decades away from building artificial general intelligence. Even if they're wrong and it's gonna take 300 years, that's just a little blink of an eye in cosmic time and we're much more likely to catch other parts of other solar systems, et cetera. Either when they're stuck in some very low level primitive thing, material stage or in the post biological stage. And as we get better and better at AI I think we'll get a better sense as to what we're looking for. And also it'll open us our abilities to do it of course, ourselves. So Max you've made the perfect entry for one slide that I'd like to show and I've been given indulgence to show one slide. Of course. Could you open up the slide? It has to do with his old music. He didn't pay me to say this. No, no, thank you. I'll buy your beer afterward. So, is there a slide somewhere? There it is, okay. So this business of time. So astronomers sort of get this but it's kind of weird and you really have to get used to it. So in a kind of logarithmic way, here's all of time. I think the 13.6 is not 13.7, isn't it Max? But it's close enough. So sun and the earth about the last third of the age of the universe. Make that one day just to get a sense of scale. Earth's been around one day. Life arose early. And I think that's interesting and important. Multicellular life, not so early. You know, just a few hours before midnight. Well, let's just look at the last hour. That gets us to where the dinosaurs stopped roaming the earth but still not anything very interesting. Let's do the last minute. Well, the very end of the last minute is when Neanderthals died off. We're still not talking very interesting stuff from a biosec- Oh, yeah. Okay. Okay. All right, Julie got tapped on the last one. I know I was gonna get in trouble. I got in trouble with Max, now I'm in trouble with Max. Everyone's opinionated, it's good. The last second, here's the last second. Two tenths of a second. 10,000 years ago, agriculture. A tenth of a second, 10th of a second, recorded history, 5,000 years. It's 50,000 years per second, is the scale here. And now the last 10th of a second, we start to have some interesting stuff from us technologically points of view. No, right. There's Jesus and Columbus and this is an American Revolution, four milliseconds. Marconi, you can think of that as the beginning of electromagnetic exploitation, two milliseconds. Lasers and radio telescopes, that's sort of the stuff I traffic in. A mere millisecond, millisecond. So here we are. All the sort of technical stuff, all in the last little instant of time. We're not evolving particularly fast, but our technology is, you know, artificial intelligence. You tell a machine now the rules of chess, don't even give it a game, and the next day it can beat anybody on earth. That's, so what's gonna be in our future there? And someone was talking casually about, oh, 100 years, that's a long time to predict. Or someone else said, a civilization's a million years more advanced than we. A million years is nothing on this scale. A million years is only 20 minutes, right? So whatever's in front, it's gonna be amazing, and we have no idea. And we think that things are sort of the way they've been, and it's biological, and you know, we'll just get a little more hairless or whatever happens. That's, you got it all wrong. It's all wrong. It's gonna be something completely different. Sorry, I have to give you a different view. I think the really interesting stuff was that first 12 hours and everything else has just been elaborations. Whoa. Just saying. It's good to be a microbiologist. Yeah, the difference of opinion here is great. I'm really enjoying this. So I also wanted to open it up. I think we have time for a couple of questions. So if anyone has a question, I don't have the thing. I got a boom box here. Perfect. Paul, I wanted to know what got you into SETI, Sex Church for Extraterrestrial Intelligence three decades ago, and what your, like, the best possible outcome would be that you get to see in your lifetime, like, what do you wanna see happen? Yeah, it's only been three decades, huh? Are you, that you said? I've been doing this a couple of decades. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I got into, you know, when I was a kid, I was that ham thing that we used to do, and I just thought it was kind of amazing that you could transmit a few watts of power and talk to somebody halfway around the world. Electromagnetic communication really is remarkable, and when I was in college or graduate school, Frank Drake came along and gave a talk about SETI, and what I realized from that is that it's not just speculation, you can calculate things, like how much power it takes, and at that time, this was in the, in the 70s, with the Arecibo Telescope and its transmitter, that could communicate with an equivalent civilization, which as we saw is primitive to us, anywhere in the galaxy, two Arecibos with their transmitters, which has to be a conservative estimate. This just lit the fire under my tail, and I've been doing SETI ever since. What would be the best outcome? We find a signal. One more question? Hi, I have a question about detection. So we have now these new technologies, like Nanopore technologies, Nanopore sequencing, and these technologies allow us to not only sequence DNA and RNA directly, but in future there will be proteins and even like sugar molecules possible. So that is actually currently, I think the highest chance to maybe detect or sequence something which is not DNA, or like their way to DNA. So this is actually very fascinating. This is just one of many technologies of things. Are you going also like a little bit in that direction in the future? Actually, I asked Lin. Okay. I'm glad you pointed out the fact that Nanopore is gonna go beyond just nucleic acids because I definitely have doubts on whether you're gonna necessarily find nucleic acid-based life close by because the nucleotides turns out are extremely difficult to make abiotically. But the proteins aren't. And I think I would very much like to see that sort of thing because I think even Shrodinger pointed out life, traffics, and polymers. And that's something that most of the analytical techniques that we've been sending to space don't do. Usually it's like bake it, destroy it, and then measure it. And so you've lost all the possibility of finding these complex molecules. My lab's going a little bit different route, but I think that the Nanopore, for example, the sort of thing that you're talking about if you can be flexible enough like you can with a mass spec would be totally amazing. The other problem is actually capturing the sample and bringing it in a non-destructive way. So if you're flying by something like Enceladus at 37 kilometers per second, you're gonna destroy everything just trying to collect it. So it's sort of a combination of having to have the collection techniques gentle enough to be able to preserve whatever you have and then have the analytical capabilities to look at things like polymers. So yes, it's a long answer. No, that's actually also like we know that the Nanopore, the BMOCO sequence has already installed in the ISS station and we have to say that it works excellent for the ISS. But that's looking at life that we already know is DNA-based. Right, exactly. Okay, great, thank you so much. Thank you everyone for coming and thank you so much panelists. Thank you. Yes, of course. It's a great matter of honor. Thank you.