>> From WXXI News.

This is Connections.

I'm Evan Dawson and our connection this hour was made with three major developments in the search for alien life.

It started back in April when scientists announced that thanks to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, they had discovered a potential signature of biological life on a distant planet.

This is exactly how many scientists believe we will eventually discover alien life, maybe even technologically civilized alien life.

You look for evidence in the atmosphere of planets, the same kinds of signatures that humans give off here on Earth with our technology.

And for a little while in April, it seemed like we had found it.

Now the planet is K2 18 B it looked like a water world teeming with life.

Then scientists do what scientists do.

They took a closer look and then took those claims apart.

Then things got really weird.

A few months later, scientists revealed that a new interstellar object was under observation.

An object called three I Atlas.

If it's not an asteroid and it's not a comet, and it came from a different solar system, what exactly is it?

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb raised the possibility that three Atlas is a piece of extraterrestrial technology sent to spy on our planet by an advanced civilization.

Loeb says he's intrigued by the Dark Forest hypothesis, which holds that advanced aliens are trying to hide from one another because they don't want to be attacked.

In the Dark Forest scenario, the universe is filled with alien civilizations, and now, Loeb says, we might be seeing evidence of it with three eye atlas.

Once again, scientists pump the brakes, chastising Loeb for being that weird alien guy who looks less like a scientist and more like Cliff Clavin.

In the age of Reddit.

But here's perhaps the strangest thing of all amidst the flurry of new data or new ideas or new images to study, the United States is deciding to scale back its effort to lead the world in this field.

Writing for The Atlantic, astrophysicist Adam Frank says, quote, the U.S. space agency is facing a funding and personnel crisis that the Planetary Society has called an extinction level event.

The Trump administration's proposed 2026 budget, a version of which passed Congress slashes NASA's funding by almost a quarter.

That means, adjusted for inflation, NASA would get the same level of funding it had in 1961, before JFK called for the United States to put a man on the moon.

End quote, with apologies to Avi Loeb, Adam Frank has become perhaps the most sober and careful scientific voice in the search for alien life.

He wrote The Little Book of Aliens.

He updated an equation designed to help us understand how likely it is that little green men are out there, but Frank is not glib about evaluating the evidence, and now he worries that the serious part of the field that does this is going to suffer.

I've been enjoying Adam Frank's new newsletter called The Everyman's Universe.

I highly recommend that listeners subscribe to it, and I've convinced him to come back in and talk about what's happening in space and why the United States is retreating from a leadership position.

Dr. Adam Frank, author and Helen F and Fred H. Gowan, professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Rochester.

Welcome back to the program.

>> It's great to be back.

Evan.

>> Is it great?

I mean, like, are you an optimist today?

>> optimist about what?

>> I don't know.

>> Anything.

>> But how about space?

>> you know, there's I mean, science will march on science.

I mean, this is an incredibly exciting time in astrophysics, but what I'm worrying about is that the.

It won't be the United States that's at the lead anymore.

that's what that article was about.

We're we're we're ceding our leadership to somebody else.

>> So right from the start here, I mentioned to Adam that this morning when we teased this program, I got an email and let's see if I can find it that I want to address, because it's important to understand why doctor Frank feels that NASA is so important as a leader.

and this is an email from Alan who says private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin are filling the role of what NASA used to do.

Fear not, the space race is not over.

But we don't need NASA to lead it anymore.

Times are changing.

>> Yeah.

So I mean, I am a huge fan of commercial space ventures.

they are actually an important part of sort of building the human infrastructure in space.

Like, you know, I think if we can get through things like climate change, et cetera., then the solar system, you know, is the, the, the future.

But I think that comment really deeply misunderstands what commercial space does and what NASA does.

Elon Musk has shown zero interest in, say, building space telescopes.

he's shown zero interest in sending you know, we're sending a helicopter to the moon, Saturn's moon Titan, which has a thick methane atmosphere.

>> We're sending a helicopter.

>> We're sending a helicopter.

NASA is sending.

>> A.

>> Helicopter.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, Elon Musk is interested in what Elon Musk is interested in.

And it's not basic science.

Elon Musk is an industrialist and views space from an industrialist perspective.

You know, he's got that kind of wacky idea that we're going to like, you know, have cities on Mars in 20 years, which is a fantasy for anybody who understands what Mars is like.

Not that, you know, we might not have cities on Mars in 200 or 300 years, but that's the timescale.

but there's just, you know, NASA is not just about getting things into orbit or even getting things to the moon.

It's about investigating the universe itself.

You know, there's no one else who's shown any interest in doing that in the commercial space venture, not Blue Origin, no one.

So that's a different part of NASA.

And where NASA has led.

And in some sense, you know, we haven't gotten we haven't had human beings on the moon since 19.

What was it, 60, 72, 73?

so human spaceflight has been kind of stalled.

Meanwhile, NASA has sent probes to every kind of thing in the in the solar system.

We've visited every planet, we've visited comets, we visit asteroids.

You know, that is not something that the commercial space ventures are going to do.

>> And if NASA and we're going to talk about the cuts to NASA, if NASA is gutted or scaled back, China's going to beat us, right?

Oh, yeah.

China.

Someone else is going to beat us.

>> Yeah, yeah.

So, you know, for example, when it comes to thinking about looking for life on other planets particularly exoplanets, distant planets, you know, you need to build a very special kind of telescope to do this.

And that was in the books.

NASA was, you know, was already getting started in building, doing the design work for what will be called the habitable World Observatory.

It will be it will be what replaces the Jwst.

It would be the most incredible, powerful piece of technology we ever built.

It's going to take 20 years to build.

And already that got scaled back in this scaled back so much that it really puts in danger the work you need to build this.

China has already announced that they're building, you know, versions of telescopes that are needed to find exoplanets.

China has, you know, China is not stepping back at all.

While we are profoundly stepping back.

And there's also Europe as well.

you know, the European Space Agency has its own stuff going on.

And so as this, you know, the chaos that has been forced on American science over the last six months, eight months, as that plays out, you know, other countries are looking at us and being like, ooh, we'll take your best people.

>> And and they are 4000 people have already left NASA.

Yeah.

From what I'm reading, either taking, you know, sort of early retirements or resigning their positions, some leaving the field and retiring, some looking elsewhere.

>> Some going elsewhere.

yeah.

So, you know, I have a lot of friends at NASA, and the morale there.

It's really it's it's difficult to talk to them, you know?

I mean, just hearing what, you know, what they're going through.

There's just the level of just sort of it's.

Yeah, of of the disarray and the programs being canceled.

And, you know, the thing about losing people, about these retirements, early retirements that people didn't want to take, you know, NASA does things that are so specialized that if you lose some of these people, you're never getting that knowledge back.

a friend of mine was telling me about a meeting he was in, and they were discussing how to get, you know, space probe, how to get space probes, you know, through particular kinds of orbits to be able to get them to, you know, the outer solar system.

And somebody floated an idea and there was an older gentleman who said, no, no, no, we tried that.

We tried that in 83.

It won't work right now.

>> He had the institutional knowledge.

>> He had the institutional knowledge.

>> To help them work around and say, don't go this way, go that.

>> Way, go that way.

Because, you know, landing a space probe on a distant planet is really hard.

>> Sending a helicopter to the moon of Saturn, which we're apparently actually doing.

>> Yeah, yeah, is super difficult.

And, you know, it requires it requires huge amounts of experience.

We've been NASA has been doing this for a while.

And this is, again, this sort of thing that this, you know, space.

Those companies are not interested in this.

They're not going to do it because they're so especially, you know, you think about someone like Elon Musk who's just sort of like, you know, we'll cut to the bone if you're not doing if you're not, you know, on mission, then you know, you're gone.

you know, this is the kind of thing that only something like NASA can do that can have that kind of broad vision about, oh, let's play with these ideas.

Let's think about this.

Let's think about that.

And then you have this institutional memory, how to get these impossible things done well.

>> And what part of the conversation we had yesterday on this program about the change to civil service, how this administration is literally sending questionnaires on what did you think of January 6th, how did you vote?

And we're not just talking about people who lead cabinets.

We're talking about thousands of workers.

And in civil society across sectors.

And so in some places, if someone resigns or is fired, they can be hired back in the future.

And you can largely be okay in others if you lose that institutional knowledge, you may not get it back.

And part of what you're describing with NASA is a deep loss, not just in where we are now, but in the kind of work that takes more than one presidential administration.

I mean, how long did it take to get, you know, Pluto's got that little heart shaped lake thing that's like, you know, look how you see how very advanced I am in describing.

>> That's pretty good.

>> How long did it take for us to send?

>> That was ten years.

>> Incredible.

>> That was ten years of travel, time of travel.

And then there was probably another ten, 15, 20 years.

So that's the thing.

Funding.

>> Building, planning.

>> Science requires to be at the cutting edge of science, as the United States has been since World War II, requires an investment, continuous investment, not only in the projects.

Right.

You decide we're going here, we're going to build this kind of telescope.

We know it's going to take us 20 years, but we're starting now.

but it also requires investing in the people who are going to build those.

One of the things that is happening now is you're losing the young people because there's no funding for them so that, you know, you're going to lose a whole generation of young scientists.

and then what's happening also, because of the way some of the immigration stuff is hitting the, you know, the science community is that we're going to lose the young people who wanted to come here.

You know, I mean, one of the reasons the United States is a powerhouse in science is that everybody, the smartest people around the world, came here to do their work.

They didn't go somewhere else.

and, you know, the more chaos there is, the less.

And with the combined with the funding, you know, those people are going to be like, no, we're going somewhere else.

You know, I'll take that postdoc in, in Germany at the Max Planck Institute.

I'm not going to take it in the United States.

>> Well, I think sometimes there's this idea that inertia will just prevail and that will will dominate.

We're number one.

We're number one in everything.

We're a superpower.

And I know you've made this point before.

I think it bears understanding.

Again, if you look throughout history, the leader in science has not always been the same country, in the same people.

>> Not at all.

Right.

If you know.

So it's 1600 and you're a young person coming up and you want to you want to be where the best science was, right?

you went to Italy because that's where Galileo was.

That's where all these laboratories were, you know, emerging in 1700, 1750, you didn't go to Italy.

Italy had passed by Italy's time as a scientific leader had passed by in 1900.

If you wanted to go where the best science was and learn from the best people, you went to Germany.

Germany was the place where the, you know, the cutting edge of science was in 1960, you didn't go to Germany, right?

So, you know, history shows this multiple times.

You know, countries lose their scientific preeminence, usually for for their own fault, their own reasons.

And, it is very hard not to see that we're not in the middle of the, of the greatest cell phone in history.

That why we are messing with science, right?

You know, the whole the amazing infrastructure that the U.S. built after World War II, the mix of, you know, government research labs university research labs is the, the, the goose that laid the golden egg over and over and over again.

It produced, you know, profound, wealth.

profound national security advances you know, so, like, you know, something as, you know, simple as the internet, right?

The internet was built by government labs, the first, you know, university Connections that all came out of university research in computer science, you know, laboratory research and computer science.

When I was a graduate student in the 80s, we were using this crazy thing called NSF net, right?

Where you could send messages across this network.

And it was, you know, and then a few years later, the internet went, you know, by 92 was starting to go public.

So, gee, how much money was made by that crazy thing called the internet, right?

So, you know, the idea, the chaos that's being created, I'm not sure we're going to get over it.

And other countries will.

Other countries will be happy to take the lead because, you know, the the nation that is at the forefront of science is the nation that leads the world.. >> Talking to Dr. Adam Frank, astrophysicist at the University of Rochester.

And we're talking about some of his recent writing about cuts at NASA and not just cuts at NASA, but what it means to see a scientific establishment, so to speak, eroded intentionally.

And what it means for established scientists, young scientists, future scientists, what it means for the United States position in the world.

Our volunteer, Gary, sends me a note.

the Titan space probe is called dragonfly.

It's supposed to be launched in July of 2028.

>> Hopefully that one will still go.

Hopefully.

>> Yeah.

Who knows.

Right.

>> Yeah.

Well, you know, what's interesting is, is at least at my last reading, that probe we were talking about that went to Pluto, the New Horizons, which took ten years to get there and is still now sailing out beyond Pluto into the Kuiper Belt and, you know, was still taking data, is still taking data.

The plan was to turn it off, just turn it off.

>> Whose plan?

>> That was under the the Trump budget.

And I'm not really sure what the status is now with the but that they they were turning they're going to turn off a whole bunch of these missions that are out there.

>> Your piece hits on a couple of these points because this really helps us understand what we are considering actually doing, which I couldn't really believe reading your piece.

So you mentioned New Horizons takes about ten years to reach Pluto after it launches, but that's a great point.

Now it's just out there flying in uncharted space at the edge of our solar system, collecting interesting data, sending.

>> Taking data.

>> And it's taking generations of work to get this thing out there, right?

>> Right.

And let's just turn it off.

Turn it off.

I don't even know, you know, the amount of money you save by turning it off is like, you know, in the in the lower decimal places of the national budget.

It doesn't you're not what are you saving compared to.

>> Turn it off.

>> So let me tell you actually a really interesting result that just came from New Horizons.

So.

Right.

New Horizons is now so far out in the solar system, past the edge in the outer, getting to the outer solar system that they were able to do is they took and it's got a camera, an accurate enough camera on it that they were able to take pictures of the stars.

And then by comparing them to pictures of the stars that we take on Earth, you know, they look a little different because now you're looking from a different point of view.

And I read a paper where this team was saying, look, this shows us that we could do interstellar travel, right?

Interstellar navigation.

You know, you're going to sail, you know, 50 light years through space.

How do you know you're going to get where you want to go?

You have to have some kind of navigation.

You have to be able to know where you are.

And so this ability to sort of track like, oh, we're seeing the stars change as we move along.

There's a whole science that has to be developed there.

And here New Horizons was taking pictures and saying, oh, look here, we can figure out how to do it.

And I was like, no, we're turning that switch off.

Just turn it off.

We don't need that.

>> listeners, if you want to join the conversation, it's 844295 talk.

It's toll free.

8442958255263 WXXI.

If you're in Rochester.

2639994, you can email the program Connections at wxxi.org.

before I get to John on the phone, John, a different John emails to say, aren't we building a nuclear reactor on the moon?

I actually don't know what the state of.

Do you know much about that?

Trump has talked about that.

He wants to.

>> Oh, well, yeah, there's I mean there's plans NASA has had I.

>> Don't know what that's about though.

>> you know, I'm not really sure exactly.

I mean, you know, part of the Artemis program was, is to, you know, have a permanent base on the moon and the idea of having a nuclear.

That's fine.

You know, it's a good place to put a nuclear reactor.

>> okay.

>> but it would power because you need to have continuous power.

on the moon.

I'm not sure that why you'd necessarily need a nuclear reactor than solar wouldn't do it for you.

but, yeah, I think that's a that would that would be a good idea to have a base on the moon and have it powered by a nuclear reactor.

>> You're right.

That Juno, which is revolutionizing astronomers understanding of Jupiter and could help them understand similarly monstrous worlds in other solar systems with other Earth like planets, could get discontinued.

>> Yeah, that's another one.

And we have to see what the status of that is now.

But, you know, there's there's, you know, there's a fleet of spacecraft.

This is the amazing thing about NASA missions.

NASA and this is we should compare this again with sort of the idea about what commercial space would do.

You know, NASA gives these missions says like, okay, this the timeline for this mission is, you know, six months.

That's what they want to get out of it.

But almost always because the engineering, NASA's engineering is so incredible, they can last ten years.

Right.

Those rovers that we've sent to Mars that have been wandering around Mars for decades, most of those had you know, the official lifetime was six months.

But because they're so well built, they just keep going and going and keep getting us new data and discovering new amazing things like that.

Mars used to be a blue planet.

They used to be, you know, oceans or at least, you know, giant lakes on Mars.

So, you know, we spent all this money, billions of dollars to send them out there.

And then the idea we're just going to turn them off is just it makes no sense.

>> You also write about the habitable, Habitable Worlds Observatory slated to launch.

This is farther out sometime in the 2040s.

>> This is the big one, right?

This is the one that WEOS.

>> Is planned to be about the same size as James Webb Space Telescope, with a similar orbit beyond the moon.

And this is meant to do what?

Help us find what it's.

>> Help us.

Help us find life in the universe.

So the idea, you know, so we've made such incredible progress over just the last ten years in figuring out how to find life on other planets.

It's, you know, it's a remarkable moment in human history.

So, you know, just to go take a few steps backward, this question of are we alone is like the oldest question around, Do the Greeks 2500 years ago, you can see the Greeks yelling at each other about it, and it's only been in the last few decades that we figured out first, that there are other planets orbiting other stars.

That was also an ancient question.

We didn't know.

You know, maybe the solar system was the only one there was.

Maybe planets were very hard to make, in which case, you know, you don't know.

You'd have to go through a billion stars before you found one that had a family of worlds.

Now, we know that every star in the sky has planets orbiting it.

But even more than that, now, we've developed the technology to be able to see into the atmospheres of these planets, even though they're like a hundred light years away.

And when we get the light that comes from the atmosphere, we can look for the fingerprints of different kinds of compounds the what, what what's in the atmosphere.

and so by we call this atmospheric characterization.

And what's amazing about life is life changes atmospheres.

Right.

So the only reason there's oxygen in our atmosphere, in Earth's atmosphere is because life put it there.

It's basically farted out by, bacteria.

>> Scientific term.

>> Yes it is.

That's a very technical term.

and so, you know, if you were to look at a distant planet and see oxygen in its atmosphere, which we, you know, could do, you would have a pretty strong case that there was a biosphere there.

Right.

And so this capacity to see into the atmospheres of distant, distant worlds and be able to tell whether there's oxygen, whether there's methane, whether there's dimethyl sulfide, which is a compound that seaweed produces.

that's a revolution.

And so the, the we're just like the James Webb is kind of just at the hairy edge of being able to do that.

So we want to build the Habitable Worlds Observatory because that telescope will be tuned to be able to do this.

And it's going to require all kinds of new technologies to be developed.

and that is why you need 20 years.

It's going to take 20 years to develop all these technologies.

And we're stumbling, you know, the new budget cuts Habitable Worlds Observatory, you know, research back and other countries are going to they're going to pick up in our absence.

>> I mean, Trump will be in his seventh term or so by the 2040s when when this thing is set to launch, China has something very similar that they are trying to do pretty aggressively, aren't they?

>> China in general?

So right now, China has already announced that they're going to be putting a or they're planning on building a planet finder, something that is just going to be very good at finding planets, characterizing planets.

We don't know yet whether they have something in mind, like the habitable something of the scale of the habitable worlds Observatory.

But the interesting thing about the Chinese space program is they don't.

They often are just like, look what we just launched.

You know.

>> I mean, they're not telling you in advance.

>> They're not telling you in advance.

There's lots of times where, like China just says, hey, you know, look, we got a space station.

Surprise.

so, yeah, so, you know, it's not clear what China, but we know that China is investing, you know, is in is putting a lot.

>> And we know if we stand still.

>> Somebody else takes.

>> We're getting.

>> Past right.

>> We're getting past.

So on the subject of the search for life, I do want to go back to your friend Avi Loeb.

Is it all right that I described him as like Cliff Clavin in the age of Reddit?

>> Well, so Avi.

>> Is I mean, he's an actual astrophysicist.

>> He's a Harvard astrophysicist.

That's what you see in all these news stories.

Harvard astrophysicist, which.

>> Is like, has this.

>> Stance on their way.

Yeah, yeah.

What they don't say is like all the other Harvard astrophysicists think he's wrong.

You know.

>> I mean, he's not a conspiracy guy.

>> No.

>> You know, one, 2345 on on Twitter.

>> I know it's I.

>> So what has happened to him?

>> I don't know, you know.

So I know Avi he's a great guy.

He's a he's a you know, he's done brilliant work in the past.

He is a generous person.

But like, I don't know all of us in the field.

Like he was one of the guys who really did some great work early on in this field of technosignatures how to, you know, find signatures not just of life, but of technological life.

But at some point, he just started, you know, at some point he just started like making claims about data that were just everybody else, all the other scientists thought was just an supportable.

And then he, you know, doubled down on them.

And then the media cascade followed him that he just I don't, you know, did he get blinded by the lights of being in the media because.

>> He's the alien guy.

Everything is aliens.

>> Everything is aliens.

And like, so you know, this so this new object.

So so let's talk about.

>> I say new object new to me.

>> But no it is it's new to us.

>> okay.

So tell.

>> Us what the object.

No.

So three I Atlas.

Yes.

So what is the I stand.

So three means it's the third time we've seen one of these.

I is interstellar object right.

There's only been.

The first one was a Oumuamua.

And that's where sort of Professor Loeb got his, you know, sort of emerged as the alien guy.

this is only the third time that we've seen something passing through the solar system, right?

Not in orbit around the sun.

It's coming from another solar system.

And we expected this for a long time, because we know that things like comets and asteroids are kind of loosely connected to the sun.

And if something when two stars pass each other, even if they're, you know, half a light year away, it creates a gravitational tug that can just spray comets out into space.

So we always expected that comets and asteroids, which are basically giant mountains, flying mountains in space, that there should be these rogue, asteroids wander around and every now and then one of them should just wander by and get caught briefly, or have its path changed by the gravity of the sun.

So we would expected this would happen.

So the first one was Oumuamua.

And so that was that was one eye slash Oumuamua.

Then there was two I Boris Borisov.

I'm not really sure what it is.

and now there's three eye atlas.

Yeah.

The name often is that is is who discovered it or the telescope that discovered it.

So, with the Oumuamua, there were things about it that were different that didn't it didn't behave necessarily like we expected, which is fine, because it's new.

It's the first time we've seen anything like this, you know.

>> It doesn't mean it's not a natural object.

>> It doesn't mean it's not a natural object.

And so, you know, Professor Loeb did this whole thing that, you know, where he proposed, which is fine.

He proposed.

Hey, this could be an alien artifact.

and that's great.

I'm all about that.

Let's propose it.

And now let's go through the list of possibilities.

And, you know, is there a better explanation?

Right.

That's always the question.

Is there a better explanation, a natural explanation, things we do understand that it could be.

And with a Oumuamua, it turned out after it took a while that yeah, there were better explanations.

But Professor Loeb just doubled down on that.

And the worst part for everybody in the astronomical community is Avi Loeb is not a comet guy.

You know, he spent his whole life doing early universe black holes.

He's did great work in that.

But there's all these people who study comets, like, deeply.

And they were like, Avi, you're wrong.

This thing you're saying about what comets do or what you'd expect, you're wrong.

That's not the way comets behave.

And he just didn't listen to him.

He just kept saying what he was saying.

And now this new 13I, Atlas is really behaving like a comet.

It's really.

>> Probably just a comet.

>> But there's still cool new things about it, like the distribution, how much water it has and the kind of water it has compared is different.

It's different from what we've seen from, you know, comets around the sun, which is awesome, right?

We're learning something.

>> You're saying that's cool enough.

>> Oh my God, that's cool enough.

>> But what he's saying is it's different enough that we should be prepared for assuming that this is a piece of alien technology designed to look like a comet that is spying on Earth.

>> And the worst part about this is, and this is where it comes down to responsibility, right?

Scientists as as someone who communicates science to the public, you know, you always have a responsibility to sort of like tell people how science works, how science reaches its conclusions that, you know, your pet theory may, you know, it's your pet theory, but that's not the community's pet theory.

and especially something like this, right?

Aliens.

Everybody loves aliens.

Everybody's interested in it.

There's so much misinformation that as a scientist, you really have a responsibility to like, you know, be very clear about what's known and what's not known and what Professor Loeb is doing.

He's got like a, you know, a newsletter, you know, like Substack Medium, where he's just like throwing out these are not scientific papers that have been peer reviewed, where other people looked at his ideas and said, hey, we're challenging you on this.

If you can't show us, if you can't prove to us this thing you're saying, then this paper won't get published.

You know, it's not going to be part of the scientific literature.

He's just throwing ideas out on, you know, medium, that then get picked up.

Harvard astronomer says, you know, alien spacecraft disguised as comet, you know, so it's just like it is very frustrating for us.

And I think it's it's, you know, it's it's it's not good for the public discourse about science and about this question, this amazing question of life in the universe.

>> But it's one reason that you want funding to continue.

You want support to continue for the real research that can answer these questions, because you do think eventually we may make such discoveries, but we're not there yet and we don't have the evidence yet.

And just as a way of kind of getting your head around the scope of this, here's what we're going to do in a minute.

We're going to take a break.

And then I've got some really good questions from listeners for doctor Frank, and I want to talk to him a little bit about his his new newsletter, which everybody should be subscribing to, because it's so good.

It's so fun.

>> I'm having so much fun.

I am having so much fun writing.

>> When I found out you were doing it, I was like, oh, you're not going to be able to sustain this.

Come on.

And then I'm like, oh, this is really good.

I really enjoyed this.

So you're doing you're doing it, you're doing it.

but I just want to tell you something that I think will I want the audience to think about this, too.

I had a conversation this summer with a 13 year old kid that I coach in baseball, and he's a really nice kid, and he and my son were playing this game where you try to figure out, like, crazy numbers and stuff.

So it's like how many grains of sand are in a cup, like in one cup, right?

And, you know, it's ridiculous, stuff like that.

And so the question was, if you could get on the fastest rocket ever made by humans and go in a straight line to the nearest star system and not stop, how long would it take you to get there?

>> a couple hundred thousand years.

>> So this guy, this 13 year old, his name is Evan, a great kid.

I love him, he said.

And this.

I thought this was a reasonable answer.

He really thought about it.

And he said, five days.

>> And we wish.

>> And the answer was minimum 80,000 years.

>> Yeah, yeah.

>> And that's assuming the fastest of the fastest rockets.

It's probably more like 100 to 200,000 years.

Exactly.

I'm not surprised that you knew this minimum 80,000 years nonstop.

Yeah.

Just to like the nearest neighbor.

>> Yeah, yeah.

>> That's how.

>> Big.

>> How big?

>> Vast space is.

>> And that's that's wild.

>> That's like the.

And there like you said, that's your that is literally your next door neighbor.

That's not the, the the the the the Starbucks down the street or the grocery store.

That is like literally, you know, you're going to go over and like borrow their tools because they're right next door.

So yeah, space is and that's what people really have to understand when we think about, you know, the possibilities of space travel and everything, it makes space travel, interstellar travel may be very, very difficult.

It may not really be possible to build interstellar civilizations.

Maybe it will.

I mean, that'd be awesome.

I'm just saying, like, you know, when you realize how big space is and that finite speed of light that you can't write.

As far as we know right now, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.

You know, it really may be a universe where, you know, solar systems can be densely populated, but interstellar travel.

>> I share that story because I actually don't think it's a bad guess for a 13 year old, because we just haven't gotten our heads around how big the bigness of this, right?

But I also share it to say, if we have already had success with New Horizons and Juno and all these things that are happening or in progress, why would you turn the lights off?

>> I know.

>> It's so hard to do this.

>> Yeah, yeah.

And the fact that like, you know, again, like the technologies that we could develop to do things like how about.

All right, we're sending a helicopter to the Titan.

How about sending a submarine?

Because that's the only place in the solar system where there are lakes.

But they're lakes of liquid methane.

so, you know, and there's a possibility that there's an entirely different kind of life that is formed in these things.

Somebody proposed this, though, submarine on Titan.

And so.

Yeah, right.

This just requires a kind of effort that's never going to happen with commercial space venture and a kind of long term, you know, you got to think 20, 30 years in the future, commercial space ventures are always going to be thinking much shorter timescales.

So.

So yeah, why would we turn out the lights I don't know.

>> All right.

Let's get a little bit of listener feedback on the other side of our only break.

And then we're going to talk about some of the good stuff that's filled up.

This the Everyman's Universe newsletter.

Adam Frank is our guest here, an astrophysicist.

We're having some fun talking about some some dark stuff.

Some dark matter matters here on Connections.

See what I did there?

>> That was good.

>> Coming up in our second hour, he was supposed to be retired.

Gary Craig, legendary local journalist, announced his retirement and then retired from the Democrat and Chronicle earlier this year.

Well, now he's got his own Substack.

He's already got hundreds of subscribers.

I'm one of them, and he's doing great work on a number of stories that people are still very engaged with.

So Gary Craig joins us to talk about his failure to retire and what he's digging into now.

That's next.

Our.

>> Coming up in our second hour, he was supposed to be retired.

Gary Craig, legendary local journalist, announced his retirement and then retired from the Democrat and Chronicle earlier this year.

Well, now he's got his own Substack.

He's already got hundreds of subscribers.

I'm one of them, and he's doing great work on a number of stories that people are still very engaged with.

So Gary Craig joins us to talk about his failure to retire and what he's digging into now.

That's next.

Our.

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More at services.ca.

Com.

>> This is Connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

All right, here's Claire and Brighton, who says I'm wondering what career advice doctor Frank is giving his students right now.

My son just got his doctorate in nuclear physics, but government nuclear labs are not hiring and postdoc positions are not being filled.

I have to think this is affecting many early career scientists right now.

Would love any advice?

>> Yeah.

This is I mean, this is the tragedy.

This is the tragedy that, , this is the real human cost of what's going on.

The, you know, people who, you know, bright young Americans who want to go contribute to American science find themselves, you know, in kind of a desert so, you know, my advice is to, you know, say, you know, stay the course, watch what happens.

Hopefully this won't last.

And that, you know, the funding levels, the it's more than the funding levels.

It's the interest.

It's the the sane science policy will, you know, will return as soon as possible.

I mean, you know, there has been some good news in Congress because it turned out that the, you know, people in Congress did recognize like, oh, yeah, having a vibrant scientific enterprise is good for American defense and American prosperity.

So like I said, for right now, I would say stay the course.

I always tell my graduate students to have a plan B, you should always have a plan B, you know, for industry or, you know, because even, you know, when I was coming up, there was a 1 in 100 chance that I would get a with my PhD, a job in at a university.

So you always have to be flexible.

But right now I'd say stay the course.

And let's hope that this doesn't continue.

>> The experience that Claire is describing, though, is pretty common right now.

>> Oh, it's really common.

You know, for young I'm you know, I'm lucky that I'm 63.

Right.

Because right now that I mean, not even as young, if I was a young professor.

Right.

Your your career is built on your research.

Your research is built on your ability to get funding to pay for young scientists, you know, other young scientists, like people think the money that you have this, this or this idea that, like scientists get grants and then they use it to buy Maseratis, they use it to fund students, right?

They use it to fund the next generation of students to do the research.

So.

>> David says, this is wildly beyond tragic, these insane cuts and gross, often deadly anti-scientific decisions from this administration.

He says he is listening, sadly.

But here's a different take.

Dallas says it's strange to hear a guy without a rocket ship.

That's you, I assume, downplaying efforts of a guy who does.

He's talking about Musk, and then he says when it comes to the scientists who quit their jobs from NASA, if they were good, they would have been hired by Musk for more money than the government was paying.

Just saying.

>> what you're saying is just entirely wrong.

Musk is not hiring people who build you know, rovers for Mars.

There's no, you know, or using that.

I mean, it just really that is not that profoundly misunderstands what kinds of technology go where Musk is building rockets.

He's not building space probes.

You know, that go to other planets.

They're very big difference.

And you know, the loss of those people.

We will feel the loss of those people.

I mean, if they were any good, they're the people who landed, you know, they're the reason why you could launch something from Earth, have it go directly to Mars, and have it land within, like 60m of where you pointed it.

I think they were pretty good at their jobs.

>> I'm sorry.

I don't mean to be laughing, but, like, I remember when.

I remember when we got the first images real close from, of Pluto, and you started to see the detail of, of Pluto, of freaking Pluto.

And I'm going, we sent something that's the size.

What's the new horizon?

What's the size of that thing?

>> I'm not really sure.

I think it was probably.

I bet it was probably a bus.

>> Yeah, I was like like an oversize lawn chair flying through space, taking incredible pictures and sending them back to us.

And it's taken years, and now we're going.

These guys obviously weren't very, very good.

Yeah, they're getting jobs elsewhere.

>> Yeah.

No, listen, you know, listen I, I have I have issues with Elon Musk for, you know, various reasons.

But you know, I mean the guy's a brilliant technologist and, you know, SpaceX is an incredible they're building great rockets.

They have lowered the cost.

>> Nobody's saying he's not like smart or good at what he does.

He's just not doing the same things.

>> Like, you know, where is SpaceX's, you know, space telescope?

There's no plans for SpaceX.

You know.

>> Because it's not profitable.

>> Well, that's not they're not interested.

Right.

It's not part of his plan.

So if you want a space telescope, don't think that Elon Musk is going to build a space telescope because there's no it hasn't shown any interest in it.

>> Oh, boy.

Charlie says, Evan, the current administration's attitude toward science might be called hubris.

I prefer ignorance and arrogance parading as common sense.

The gutting of NASA is personally troublesome.

As I was a child of the 60s, being allowed to stay home to watch the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo launches.

I remember the sense of pride throughout the country with every launch.

I believe the current so-called leader of our country wishes his nose was longer, so he couldn't see past it.

I am just furious about the state of science and discovery here in the United States.

It is embarrassing.

That's from Charlie.

>> Well, I think what's really happening is, you know, it's it's it is you.

It's hard to describe.

I mean, really, it's it's the passing of a torch.

We're stepping back and someone that's what is most upsetting to me.

So I, you know, I ended that article by saying, wherever I go in the world, I travel a lot for science representing American science.

And wherever I go in the world, I see people from those countries wearing two different kinds of American.

You know, American cultural artifacts.

One is the Yankees cap, which makes me really angry being a Mets fan, but the other is the NASA logo.

Everywhere you go, people are wearing the NASA.

>> Logo around.

>> The world.

Right?

And so you're not going to see this.

You're not going to see this change tomorrow.

but you will see this change in ten, 15 years when we're just not building this kind of stuff, where the young people who have the best ideas about space exploration, about building those, you know, the space telescopes are going to take jobs in for the European Space Agency or for India or for China.

and that NASA we will have just we will have stepped back if we step back, others are going to step forward.

You know, that is history.

>> And something just occurred to me with Dallas's comments about, like, if these people were any good, they'd be getting profitable jobs at SpaceX.

I think there is.

I'm sure there is this underlying idea.

And right now it's in what you would call conservative circles or the political right in this country, that if you work for government, you're just a waste that you don't really offer anything.

You just drain tax dollars.

You're just a sponge.

You don't offer anything for the public.

Right.

And what we need is mass downsizing.

That's why DOGE was cheered by many people at the start.

Right.

And what that ignores is, of course, there is waste somewhere.

I mean, of course government can be clumsy and inefficient.

And of course, the private sector sometimes can move better and faster.

Nobody disputes that.

But this idea of we're just going to malign anybody who works for government as just not good enough to be in the private sector.

When the reality is maybe they don't want to be in the private sector.

Maybe they are phenomenal at what they do.

Maybe the people who work in your national parks are awesome at what they do.

Maybe you've got great park rangers, maybe you have phenomenal career agents in the FBI or the CIA who are being purged.

Now.

Maybe you've got incredible people at NASA who have the kind of institutional knowledge that can send a lawn chair to Pluto and take pictures that we can look at.

I mean, these are not people who are just a drain on the system, and there needs to be at least a little bit of a reframing or an understanding of what it means to be in civil service or working for the government.

>> Right?

Well, especially when it comes to science, the return on investment.

Right?

So whoever sent that email to you was using the internet and using computers and using and all of that, you know, is none of that would have existed without the intimate connection with government funded research.

None of it would be there.

You would not be able to type your message out and send it on your cell phone or something without the, you know, so you know, like, as I was saying before this, this, you know, the government labs like NASA, but it's all the government labs.

It's the NIH, it's the as well as university funded research.

Is the is the the return on investment people have done this is like, you know, factors of ten.

You know, you put $1 in, you get $10 worth of, you know, of vibrant businesses and jobs and national defense out of it.

So that sort of view of like, oh, these guys are you know, they're not doing anything just is a is such a profound misunderstanding of what has made America a superpower since World War II.

That by misunderstanding that you are sort of condemning us to not being, you know, at the forefront of the world, especially when it comes to science, because, again, like I said, the country that leads in science is going to be the country that leads the world.

>> I've got so much more feedback.

I'm going to try to get as much as I can here.

This is Bob and Mendon on the phone.

Hey, Bob, go ahead.

>> Hi.

Actually, I'm calling because something said earlier needed to be repeated, and he just repeated it.

the person who leads the country that leads in science leads the world.

the fact that we're pulling everything from research, from science.

And it was just said recently by somebody in the administration, we need to stop believing the experts.

That whole idea.

I don't think people understand just how dangerous that is and where it's going to lead us.

>> Yeah.

I you know, I completely agree.

And this thing, this weird thing about expertise, right?

It's like, you know, everybody's an expert at their own life, right?

You know, everybody is an expert in something, right?

So, you know I actually had to call my furnace guy the other day, you know, because my furnace is not working.

And I always love when, you know, the HVAC people come because, you know, this is kind of applied physics, and they know so much I don't know about how to actually move hot air around, you know, and the degree of their expertise is, is phenomenal.

And, you know, if I said something to my HVAC guy like, well, this probably requires, you know, 60ft of of, of venting, you know, and he'd look at me like, what?

What did you just make that up, you know, and this is what we find in public discourse, in science, people saying like, because they don't want to listen to the experts, you know, just saying ridiculous stuff.

And the problem is, nature doesn't care about your opinions, right?

Nature doesn't care how you think.

You know, in general, all of us, what you know, any of us think about the way nature works.

Nature's just going to go ahead and do what it does.

And so we that's what I mean about paying the price.

If we turn away from science, then not only will our stuff fail in, you know, the but also other people's other countries stuff will succeed.

>> Do a brief armchair psychologist real quick here because Bob's saying he he thinks this administration doesn't want us to lead in science anymore.

John and Victor called in to ask, what does Adam think?

The reason is that Trump is doing this?

>> Yeah.

It's hard, I don't know.

I don't know because this is such a, you know, look, nobody needs to hear my opinion about politics, right?

I mean, you know, I this I, but I, you know.

>> Are you baffled by the Trump is a competitive person.

He likes to win.

>> Exactly.

Yeah.

No, that's what I don't understand.

I don't understand this part.

It just seems like, you know what the British would call bloody mindedness.

you know, everybody understands Republican governments, Democratic governments throughout history supported American science.

They understood why, you know, the value of American science.

So I, you know, I don't know what's going on, but it is it is it is shortsighted.

It is so drastic that I have to be honest with you.

I'm not sure we're going to recover.

I hope we will.

But I think there's been some damage done that's going to be.

That may be long term.

but but I don't I don't honestly know.

It doesn't it doesn't make any kind of sense.

Like there's no policy sense that this, that you can ascribe to this.

>> On YouTube.

Greg in San Diego wanted to know how many Earth days does it take to get to the planet Mars?

Going one way.

>> Yeah.

So that's interesting.

We were just talking about this before, you know, the way we use rockets right now is that, you know, fuel is so hard to come by.

You got to launch the fuel that you're going to use to get you wherever you're going.

So like, what we kind of do is we just, like, turn the rocket motors on briefly and then coast until we get to Mars and then turn the rocket motors on to break.

so now it can take like nine, depending on where Mars and Earth are.

You know, they're always moving around the solar system.

It can take like nine months or more.

but if we could develop rockets like nuclear powered rockets, where you could continually accelerate, like you'd basically have your engines on, you know, accelerating at one g half the way there, turn around, turn the rocket around, and then decelerate.

You could probably get there in weeks.

Months, a month, probably.

>> Since we got about five minutes left.

Here's what we're going to do.

We're going to speed round through your newsletter stuff that stood out to me.

But where can people find your new newsletter?

It's so good.

>> Every man's Universe.com subscriber, every man's universe.com no apostrophe.

>> It's really fun.

It's funny, there's a great picture of you as a superhero.

>> Love that picture.

>> Did you.

>> Draw that?

Designed that?

I was like.

>> You drawing pictures of yourself as a superhero?

every man's universe.

okay, there's only one true bipartisan issue left.

Cell phones and schools.

You're a professor.

Are you good with taking cell phones out of the classroom?

>> I would the first thing I'm going to be teaching in an hour.

And I do not let my students use no open computer unless you have a medical reason.

No computers open, no cell phones.

You know, come back here and I try to make my classes as interactive as possible.

But yeah, no way.

>> So this is a case where we can get both parties together.

Look, we did it.

We found something.

was Andor snubbed by the Emmys?

>> Yes.

Oh, my God, don't even get me started.

How much time do we have.

>> Left Andor?

>> The greatest Star Wars ever made.

>> Andor is the best.

>> It's one of the best.

It's one of the best.

I mean, the first movie is still the greatest Star Wars ever made.

And the second movie was pretty great.

But, you know, I have not been a big fan of a lot of the movies that came afterwards.

I mean, I'm so sick of the Skywalkers, you know, and their saga.

>> And you want.

>> Other stuff.

>> I want other.

The Star Wars universe is so rich and interesting.

Andor was just like, so well done.

The performances.

And, you know, it was about the rise of totalitarianism.

It was about the rise of the Empire.

It was just phenomenal.

I mean, I loved The Mandalorian.

That was a great show.

But yeah, I mean, Andor was at the level, as people have called it.

It's adult Star Wars.

You know, there's no cute teddy bears.

There's no and the performances in it were just stunning.

There are these certain, you know, scenes that, you know, have bounced around the internet just because of what great acting it was.

So, yeah.

>> What the heck?

Got snubbed?

We'll do a whole hour on Andor.

Yeah.

>> you write that Mars is for losers.

Here's our real future in space.

And you're right.

You're being cheeky.

Mars is not.

>> For losers.

Mars is not for you.

Respect the.

>> People, including space, who have ideas about it.

But our real future in space may not be developing colonies on Mars.

It might be on.

>> Asteroids.

>> Asteroids spinning up, asteroids hollowing out asteroids.

So spinning them up and building basically cities that could be the size of Manhattan, you know, because the problem with Mars, with any planet is that it's a gravity well, you got to, you know, you need a rocket to land safely, you know, not crash land on it.

And then you need a rocket to get back up.

But with an asteroid, if you have the technologies to, to, you know, sort of process the asteroid material.

And we actually did a paper, at the University of Rochester, a whole bunch of us where we showed how this might actually be done.

And that's what I was talking about in that thing that.

Yeah, you could like, basically, use asteroids to build space.

Cities, rotating space cities that would rotate at a rate where you'd feel gravity and everything and imagine like 100,000 of these in the future, each one having, you know, a million people you'd have, like a pretty large population in space.

>> Do you think there's a greater chance that 200 years from now, there's people living on Mars or people living on an asteroid?

>> I think both will be I think I think people will explain.

>> What's going.

>> To happen first.

>> I think probably Mars, I think probably will do Mars first.

But long term I wouldn't.

I would bet that asteroids would be there could be.

>> A lot.

>> Where's the better quality of life going.

>> To be?

>> asteroids.

>> On the asteroids?

>> Because you can't terraform Mars, right?

Or you can, but it would take, like, thousands of years.

This is why Elon Musk's thing, if you want to criticize Elon Musk, his thing about Mars is plan B, you know Mars is going to take we can build stuff on bases on Mars.

I'm all for it.

But you know, Mars is still going to be a frozen hell and you're gonna have to live underground.

You have to live underground on Mars.

Whereas, like these space habitats, you could actually have, like, really parks and, you know, really nice living.

>> If listeners want to learn more about living on an asteroid, there is a great science fiction series that Adam consulted on.

What's it called.

>> The Expanse?

>> Still worth seeing.

>> I did, I wrote about it a lot.

I talked to those guys I wish I'd consulted.

>> Oh, okay.

Well, I'm giving you too much credit, but you really liked it.

>> I love.

>> It.

>> okay, I'm reading the books again right now and enjoying it.

>> I'd still like to live on Earth in the future.

That would be my preference.

>> I'd want to live in space.

Give me a give me a rotating asteroid any day.

>> okay.

All right.

Good luck to you.

doctor.

Adam Frank, author and the Helena f and Fred H. Gowan, professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Rochester, author of The Every Man's Universe.

It is so good.

Subscribe to that.

Thank you.

>> It's been a pleasure, as always.

>> For being here.

More Connections coming up in a moment.

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