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Joe Rogan Experience #2363 - David Kipping

David Kipping is an astronomer and associate professor at Columbia University, where he leads the Cool Worlds lab https://www.coolworldslab.com Get anything delivered on Uber Eats. https://ubereats.com Take 50% off a SimpliSafe system at https://simplisafe.com/ROGAN

Joe RoganhostDavid Kippingguest
Aug 9, 20253h 0mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:0015:00

    (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast,…

    1. NA

      (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

    2. JR

      The Joe Rogan Experience.

    3. DK

      Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (instrumental music plays) And we're up.

    4. JR

      What's up, man? How are you?

    5. DK

      It's good. Yeah.

    6. JR

      Pleasure to meet you, sir.

    7. DK

      Pleasure to be here. Thanks, Joe.

    8. JR

      I really enjoy your content online. It's been really fascinating, so I've been doing a deep dive into a lot of your videos over the last few days and-

    9. DK

      Yeah.

    10. JR

      ... enjoying the hell out of it, and, uh, particularly enjoying... Uh, I wanted to talk to you about so many different things, but one of the most pressing things, one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you in, 'cause you are very knowledgeable in all things space, is the James Webb Telescope, and, uh, all the different stuff that they've been finding, particularly about these galaxies that were formed very shortly after the... not shortly, you know-

    11. DK

      Yeah.

    12. JR

      ... not within our, our lifetime shortly, but-

    13. DK

      Right.

    14. JR

      ... cosmologically shortly after the Big Bang, that, uh, it seems like we have to figure out why these things are forming. Is the universe older? There's all this different kind of speculation. Maybe the Big Bang is not 13 point whatever billion years old, but maybe 22, 24. Like, what, what is your take on all this?

    15. DK

      Yeah. The, the James Webb Space- Space Telescope is such an incredible instrument. The data has just blown us away. You know, when you build this thing and you look at it un- unfolding in space, you think there's so many ways it could go wrong, that we all were just like... You know, there's, I think there's 215 moving parts or something had to unfold. So, you know, just the fact that it-

    16. JR

      In space. (laughs)

    17. DK

      Yeah. (laughs) The fact it just all worked was just remarkable.

    18. JR

      Right.

    19. DK

      And then when we got those first images, they just kind of blew us away as well, 'cause they, we had sort of these engineering expectations of what it would do, but the data was just even better than that. So when it, you know... Of course, the first thing you want to do is point it to the most distant part of the universe and see what's out there-

    20. JR

      (laughs)

    21. DK

      ... in those darkest patches. And so when it did that, yeah, it started finding a couple of things. It started finding quasars, which are kind of the, uh, the center of these very active gala- galaxies. These are super massive black holes that have loads of crap falling in, and they're spewing out all this energy. They're kind of feeding super massive black holes. And so we started detecting those way earlier than we thought the universe should be able to build them. Because to make a super massive black hole, I mean, these things are like a, a hundred million solar masses. Imagine that, a hundred million suns-

    22. JR

      Pew.

    23. DK

      ... have c- have not only been born, but died, gone through their entire life cycle, died, collapsed into a black hole, and then those black holes have presumably somehow merged together into this super behemoth of this hundred million solar mass thing. So we're finding those just, you know, 300 million years after the Big Bang. And that, that was like, "Hold on. That, that doesn't make any sense. Like, how, how can this be?" And similarly, with the, uh, with the galaxies, we were seeing these images. These galaxies, and you can date roughly how old they should be based off the red shift. So, the l- you know, the universe is expanding, so therefore, if something is very far away from us and the universe is expanding, its light gets stretched more and more and more as it journeys over space. And so we can use that red shift to kind of date how old these things are. When we use those dates, we look at these images, again, they seem suspiciously too, too old. You know, you really shouldn't be able to form these things that, that early on in the universe. And so that kind of puzzled us. Um, I think for the galaxy thing, there was a bit of a resolution there. One of the, uh, resolutions is that we probably, um, miscalculated how, how easy it is to form these galaxies in the first place. So we had these models for galaxy formation. We had these models for how stars should form, how quickly they should live. But it was all essentially calibrated on what we see around us, like right here in this part of the universe, in the local universe. And then we kind of realized that those same models probably need to be tweaked if you're going to apply them to the early universe, where the density is so much higher, the, the gas temperature is much hotter. Everything's just, you know, completely different in the early universe. So when you kind of make those corrections, it actually looks like maybe it's actually possible to make those galaxies earlier than we thought. So I think the galaxy problem is a bit easier to explain. I think the quasar problem, to me, is more interesting. How do you get those super massive black holes so early? Um, there's a certain kind of maximum rate you can feed these things called the Eddington limit, and that's sort of, you throw mass into a black hole, and so much energy is going in, some of it spews back out. And the energy which spews back out stops other stuff coming in. Right? So there's a maximum limit. You can't build a black hole faster, in principle, than this Eddington limit. And yet, when you do the calculation, these black holes must have been fed what we call Super-Eddington, so faster than Eddington. So something's wrong with our models, right? Either, e- either we've got the universe age wrong, which I think is possible, but I would say that's probably a much less likely solution, or we've got the astrophysics wrong.

    24. JR

      Why do you think that the universe's age is a less likely solution?

    25. DK

      Because we've got this, this... You know, like in particle physics, you've got the standard model, which includes like all the particles and the electron, the baryons, all this kind of stuff. And in cosmology, we have a similar kind of model. It's called Lambda-CDM. And so the Lambda stands for dark energy and the CDM is cold dark matter. So this is our standard model, and we have used it to explain so much stuff in the universe, Joe. I mean, we're talking about the cosmic microwave background, um, oscillations in the sky, like these baryonic acoustic oscillations, the stretching of the universe, Cepheids. You can use it to explain so much stuff, and it works beautifully. I mean, it works down to, like, the 0.01% level. So if you say the universe age is wrong, you have to give that up. So maybe it is, maybe it is wrong, but if you give that up, you have to come up with a radical new idea which can now explain all of this stuff at that same level of precision. The much more likely answer, in my book, is that astrophysics, like the, you know, gas swirling around, the plasma colliding with each other, that's just more complicated, in my mind, than the, than the actual model of just the simple expansion of the universe, which actually is a fairly simple geometric model.

    26. JR

      Fairly simple in that you can use whatever methods that we're using currently to measure everything that's out there and it makes sense.

    27. DK

      Yeah, yeah.

    28. JR

      But-If we're let- if we're using something like the James Webb Telescope, so we're getting a much deeper view of the universe, how limited is the James Webb in comparison to the James Webb 2.0, 3 point-

    29. DK

      Yeah.

    30. JR

      Like, are we going to have to continually revamp what our, uh, our understanding of this process is?

  2. 15:0030:00

    Whoa. …

    1. DK

      a super-Earth, a mega-Earth? Or is it a scaled-down version of Neptune? Is it like an ocean world, maybe, of some kind? And turns out that planet is the most common type of planet in the universe, as far as we can tell.

    2. JR

      Whoa.

    3. DK

      And we don't have one.

    4. JR

      Wow.

    5. DK

      So that's kind of weird, right? I mean, it seems like there's so many aspects of our Solar System that are unusual. Even having a Jupiter, only 10% of stars have a Jupiter, as far as we can tell.

    6. JR

      10% of how many stars that have been observed?

    7. DK

      Oh, at this point? I mean, we've observed hundreds of thousands of stars, um, and we know of about 6,000 exoplanets. So of that population, you correct for the success, you correct for the ones you've missed. Even so, I mean, these Jupiters are the easiest ones to find, right? They're the big boys, they're easy, they wobble the star a ton, so they're pretty easy to spot. Um, so we're pretty confident that sun-like stars, it's, it's kind of not typical for them to have these Jupiter-sized planets, and we've got two of them.

    8. JR

      Hmm.

    9. DK

      So that seems interesting, right?

    10. JR

      Yeah.

    11. DK

      To our, to our own origin in this Solar System. And suddenly having eight planets? That's pretty unusual. We don't see many systems with that many planets packed together.

    12. JR

      How many solar systems are binary solar systems, as opposed to having a single star?

    13. DK

      Yeah. Yeah, about half of all stars live in binary systems.

    14. JR

      Really?

    15. DK

      It's very common. So actually, Alpha Centauri AB, that's the nearest star system to us, and it's actually a trinary. There's Alpha AB that go around each other really close, and then there's Proxima Centauri, which is on the outside. And actually, just this morning, Joe, just this morning, there was an announcement of a giant planet around Alpha Cen A. It's a candidate. We don't know if it's confirmed yet, but it's, it's kind of in the habitable zone, so the distance where, in principle, you could have liquid water on the surface of a rocky planet.

    16. JR

      So it is a candidate f- for a planet? Or like, it, it has been-

    17. DK

      Yes.

    18. JR

      ... it, so it hasn't been completely confirmed as a planet?

    19. DK

      James Webb just spotted it.

    20. JR

      Oh.

    21. DK

      James Webb spotted it just, just the, just come out today. So there's three photos that James Webb took. Maybe they'll be in this article somewhere. He took three images and in one of those images, it captures an actual photo of the planet. You can see the planet in direct light.

    22. JR

      Whoa.

    23. DK

      That's how powerful James Webb is.

    24. JR

      Let me see that.

    25. DK

      And it's a nearby star, so it's easy to image. Yeah, right here, so... That S1, that's the planet you're looking at.

    26. JR

      Wow.

    27. DK

      So you can see you have to block out the star in the middle, 'cause the star is like a billion times brighter than the planet is, so-

    28. JR

      (laughs)

    29. DK

      ... you have to suppress it with all this advanced coronagraph technology that James Webb has. But when you do that and you zoom right in, you see this little planet there? That's, uh, it's probably about the same size as Saturn. It's probably a big boy.

    30. JR

      I love how they went with a real clickbaity headline with Avatar planet, the other, the other article that you pulled up. What was it saying?

  3. 30:0045:00

    And this is just…

    1. DK

      So whenever you have light bending, that's a telescope, that's a mirror. So you can take light that's coming from behind the sun, it'll bend to a focus. And that focus point, we know where it is, you can calculate it. It's about 550 times further out than we are around the sun, so 550 AU. And along... If you just travel out in a line from that point, it's called a focal line, you put a telescope there, it would essentially have the collecting area-... of the sun. So you could image continents, rivers, even cities on a nearby exoplanet if you could put something there. It'd be wild. That is, that is the ultimate, in my book, for what an alien would do. If they wanted to observe Earth, they would just, behind their sun, they'd stick one of those telescopes and they'd be able to monitor a hell of a lot about the Earth from there.

    2. JR

      And this is just with our understanding of telescopes and our understanding of viewing things. And clearly, you could imagine a world-

    3. DK

      With known physics, yeah.

    4. JR

      Yeah.

    5. DK

      With known physics.

    6. JR

      You can imagine physics that are a million years more technologically advanced-

    7. DK

      Sure.

    8. JR

      ... and innovations that we can't even comprehend-

    9. DK

      Yeah.

    10. JR

      ... can't even conceive of-

    11. DK

      Yeah.

    12. JR

      ... that change everything.

    13. DK

      I mean, I mean, even with this telescope, you can't see people, right? You wouldn't be able to image Earth. You wouldn't be able to read, like, the headlines on a newspaper on someone's doorstep. It's not powerful enough to do that. If you wanna do that, you'd have to visit the system. And so we're talking about doing that as well. So there was this Project Starshot that wanted to fly a probe directly towards the nearest star, fly by super fast, snap a photo, and beam it back. 'Cause that way, you could actually get even better resolution, right? You could really dial in and see roads and structures on the surface.

    14. JR

      How long would it take for that beam to get back to us?

    15. DK

      Well, it's four light years away, 4.2 light years away.

    16. JR

      So it would take four years for us to get the image?

    17. DK

      Yes, and it would take about 20 years to do the journey at the speeds they were talking.

    18. JR

      Wow.

    19. DK

      They wanna go 20% the speed of light. So they'd take 20 years, take a photo, so 24 years altogether.

    20. JR

      Wow.

    21. DK

      So this was Yuri Milner's brainchild, and his dream was that he could see a photo in his lifetime of another Earth-like planet.

    22. JR

      Wow.

    23. DK

      And that's pretty much the best way we have to really pull that off in human lifetime.

    24. JR

      Is the work being done to try to make that happen?

    25. DK

      Yeah, so I'm not sure the current status of Starshot. Um, Yuri put $100 million up, I believe, for, you know, his own money, and I think Mark Zuckerberg came in on it, and they were like, "We're gonna try and do this." Um, I wasn't part of that project, but I was inspired by it. And I actually, um, came up with a twist on it recently called TARS from Interstellar. (laughs) You, you know TARS from the movie?

    26. JR

      What was TARS?

    27. DK

      It's like a robot thing-

    28. JR

      Oh, okay.

    29. DK

      ... that's in the movie. It's called TARS. And so I came up with, uh, a twist on, on their idea. So let me explain their idea quickly first, and then I'll give you my twist. Their idea is like, if you really wanna go to the nearest star system, you're not going to do it with a giant spaceship. That's just, you know, uh, we can't build anything that advanced right now. The most realistic thing we can do is to get a tiny, thin sheet of material, like imagine like, um, a piece of Mylar, a piece of, uh, aluminum foil, and blast it with light, with a laser. And so they're talking about sort of 100 gigawatts of laser power, right? So just kind of crazy amounts of energy.

    30. JR

      Is it there?

  4. 45:001:00:00

    Yeah. …

    1. JR

      that. But when you get back to, like, 2004 and you're talking about something that can go from 50,000 feet above sea level to sea level in w- less than a second. Like s-

    2. DK

      Yeah.

    3. JR

      I think it's seven-eighths of a second it went. You have, uh, visual confirmation, you have radar, you have video of it, you have two different jets that see this thing, they... No one knows, understands what it is. It flies directly to their cap point, where their meet-up point was supposed to be. The whole thing's nuts.

    4. DK

      Yeah.

    5. JR

      It's, it's aus-

    6. DK

      I, I would love to know what the hell happened.

    7. JR

      Yeah.

    8. DK

      I think, like everyone, I'm fascinated by it.

    9. JR

      You can't throw it away. It's one of those ones you can't throw... I, I throw most of them away. Most of 'em... I, I, I love UFO stories 'cause they're fun.

    10. DK

      Yeah.

    11. JR

      But most of them, like, could be anything.

    12. DK

      If there's something shady going on, yeah.

    13. JR

      Could be anything. Could be people want attention, could be military exercises, could be mass delusion, could be people just love to be special and have had some sort of an encounter.

    14. DK

      Yeah.

    15. JR

      Which they do. It gives them some sort of social credit to have some sort of an encounter with a, a thing and they exaggerate, and people love, love-

    16. DK

      Yeah.

    17. JR

      ... to exaggerate.

    18. DK

      Yeah, I'd love to make this ingestible to science. That's sort of been my goal.

    19. JR

      Yeah.

    20. DK

      Like, how can science take a hold of this? And, you know, when we do these experiments... I mean, I told you about this, this moon that I thought I'd found, and it turned out it was the instrument being crazy. Right?

    21. JR

      Yes.

    22. DK

      'Cause sometimes instruments do crazy stuff-

    23. JR

      Sure, of course.

    24. DK

      ... that we don't understand. So the only way to figure that out is to get hold of the instrument, right? We need to get it-

    25. JR

      Right.

    26. DK

      ... in our labs and take that thing apart and test it and calibrate it, et cetera, and we don't have access to those military devices. It's all top secret, so, uh, we can't even do that experiment, but-

    27. JR

      Right.

    28. DK

      ... I could imagine thinking about how to do that. Um, one of the big numbers we don't know, even with the visual reports, is the false positive rate, so this is a key number in science. Whenever you're doing an experiment, you need to know how often does the experiment produce something that's spurious, the false positive rate. Now, in the US, there's about, uh, 28,000 pilots across all military branches, and they fly something like 200 hours per year on average. So that's 5.6 million hours in the air every year, in one year. Now, let's say a pilot, one in every 10,000 hours that they fly, they mi- they make a mistake. They misidentify a balloon for a UAP or whatever it is. One in 10,000. That's an incredibly low, by the way, error rate to have, but even then you'd end up with 560 UAPs a year made that way. All spurious, all not real, just from human error. Um, so the only way... And that's actually pretty similar to Project Blue Book. Project Blue Book found about 742 per year was being reported. So, you know, I made that number up, one in 10,000, but we need to know what that number is. If, if it turns out there's an excess, like the error rate is 100,000, then that Project Blue, blue... Project Blue Book number is super interesting and it would be an excess, and we'd say we've detected something. There's a real anomaly here that we have to look at. But the problem is we don't know what that number is. I mean, you'd have to somehow put these pilots in, like, simulators or something where you have complete control conditions for thousands of hours and somehow test how often do they make these mistakes.

    29. JR

      Also, the problem... Pro- Project Blue Book was not an objective analysis of UFOs. They had a directive, and the directive was to discredit everything.

    30. DK

      Yeah. Yeah, but even, even... Sorry, I'm just giving you sort of a ballpark. I mean, the NASA UAP Task Force was similar kind of numbers.

  5. 1:00:001:10:53

    Yeah. …

    1. JR

      as many material possessions as they can. It's just totally illogical, totally illogical you'd spend all your time, this finite amount of time where you know your most wonderful experiences are all with the people that you love, having fun with friends and your family and laughing and having joy, but yet what do you do? You're trying to get another house and a fucking plane and a this and a that and a car and a that. It's nonsense. We're silly. But we're 100% committed to getting more stuff.

    2. DK

      Yeah.

    3. JR

      You know, it's like this bizarre life form. But it's figuring itself out, you know? And we're aware of that bizarreness. Like I'm saying this and no one is going, "That doesn't make any sense." Like everyone knows it's crazy-

    4. DK

      Mm-hmm.

    5. JR

      ... to like concentrate on acquiring the most shit when you're gonna die when you're 100 if you're lucky, if everything goes great. So if you're 60 and that's all you're thinking about, that's crazy.

    6. DK

      Yeah.

    7. JR

      Everyone knows that. But we, yet we still all do it. It's still collectively something that like the vast majority of people engage in.

    8. DK

      We're programmed that way. We can't get out of it.

    9. JR

      Well, I think it's one of the things that leads us to technological innovation and one, one of the things that leads us to the creation of artificial life. It's like when I think about beings that do things that seemingly...... I mean, obviously leafcutter ants know what they're doing. Right? 'Cause they do it everywhere, the same way. I mean, I have them in my yard.

    10. DK

      Mm-hmm.

    11. JR

      They're fascinating, man.

    12. DK

      Yeah, I love seeing them. Yeah.

    13. JR

      They're so cool. They leave-

    14. DK

      The Museum of, uh, Natural History has this awesome exhibit, and you can just see them crawling along, all across the museum. And yeah, my kids and I were just like-

    15. JR

      They're so cool.

    16. DK

      Yeah.

    17. JR

      So obviously, they know what they're doing. But how do they know what they're doing? And why are they doing that? Why do they always create that structure that literally has room for fermentation, so it has air holes that go through, these chambers where they drop the leaves in, they let the l- the leaves, the natural rotting take place, and fermentation. Like, how, what... Okay, that's what leafcutter ants do, that's what they do. Well, what do we do? If w- I was looking at us from somewhere else, I was like, "What is it the predominant species on this planet does?" Well, it makes better shit. That's what it does. It's the only planet that makes things, that manipulated its environment radically, even to the detriment, and ignores it, because it wants to keep doing it. Whether it's pollution, whatever we're doing-

    18. DK

      Right.

    19. JR

      ... to the ocean, whatever we're doing to the rivers and the lakes and the w- the water table. Like, all the crazy stuff that we do, we just keep doing it because we have to do it, 'cause progress. We need progress.

    20. DK

      Yeah.

    21. JR

      Like, I would look at that thing. I was like, "What did that thing do?" Well, it keeps making better stuff every year.

    22. DK

      Wh- what you're describing is actually kind of similar to... There's a guy called Robin Hanson, an economist, and he has this idea called Loud Aliens, Grabby Aliens. And he says the thing we do as, as a intelligent species is transform our environment. Right? We're not subtle. Right? You, you know-

    23. JR

      Right.

    24. DK

      ... if you're a deer and you come across New York City, it's not like y- you're gonna miss that thing.

    25. JR

      Right.

    26. DK

      Right? It's right in front, in front of you. Like, there's no way you can miss it. So-

    27. JR

      It's the craziest beehive ever.

    28. DK

      Right. So, how come we don't see beehives i- in the stars? I mean, this is kind of the fundamental problem. And he argues that that is a innate thing th- that an intelligent species should do. He's coming from the, you know, the economi- economic side, so that's kind of how economists think about things, is this kind of growing, exponential expansion of, of capitalism, essentially, across the universe. And yet, we don't see it. So, his explanation is that it's happening, um, but it's a wave of colonization that's spreading at the speed of light. And if it spreads close to the speed of light, you don't see it until it hits you. Right? There's just... Y- you can't perceive it-

    29. JR

      Ah.

    30. DK

      ... 'cause nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. So, there's, it's coming. So, here's this prediction. I'm a little bit skeptical about it for various reasons. But, um, yeah, people have thought about that, um, and suggested it. My own take is that, um, the most likely form of alien contact we'll have will actually be with a future inhabitant of the Earth. So, the Earth has-

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