Lex Fridman PodcastSara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System | Lex Fridman Podcast #116
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,223 words- 0:00 – 5:32
Introduction
- LFLex Fridman
The following is a conversation with Sara Seager, a planetary scientist at MIT known for her work on the search for exoplanets, which are planets outside of our solar system. She's an author of two books on this fascinating topic. Plus, in a couple of days, August 18th, her new book, a memoir called The Smallest Lights in the Universe is coming out. I read it and I can recommend it highly, especially if you love space and are a bit of a romantic like me. It's beautifully written. She weaves the stories of the tragedies and the triumphs of her life with the stories of her love for and research on exoplanets, which represent our hope to find life out there in the universe. Quick summary of the ads. Three sponsors: Public Goods, that's a new one, PowerDot, and Cash App. Click the links in the description to get a discount. It really is the best way to support this podcast. As a quick side note, let me say that extraterrestrial life, aliens, I think represent our civilization longing to make contact with the unknown, with others like us or maybe others that are very different from us, entities that might reveal something profound about why we're here. The possibility of this is both exciting and, at least to me, terrifying, which is exactly where we humans do our best work. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcasts, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter @lexfridman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now, and never any ads in the middle that could break the flow of the conversation. I try to make these ad reads interesting if you do listen, but if you like, I give you timestamps so you can skip to the conversation. But still, please do check out the sponsors by clicking the special links in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. This show is sponsored by Public Goods, the one-stop shop for affordable, sustainable, healthy household products. Their products have a minimalist black and white design that I find to be just clean, elegant, and beautiful. It's a style that makes me feel like I'm living in the future. I imagine we'll all be using Public Goods products once we colonize Mars. They got all the basics you need from healthy snacks like almonds, to my favorite, the bamboo toothbrush, and other stuff for personal care, home essentials, healthy food, and vitamins and supplements. I take their fish oil, for example, which I recommend highly for everyone. They use a membership model to keep costs low and pass on the savings to us, the people. They plant one tree for every order placed, and have planted over 100,000 trees since September 2019. Visit publicgoods.com/lex or use code LEX at checkout to get 15 bucks off your first order. This show is sponsored by PowerDot. Get it at powerdot.com/lex and use code LEX at checkout to get 20% off and to support this podcast. It's an e-stim, electrical stimulation device, that I've been using a lot for muscle recovery, mostly for my shoulders and legs as I've been doing the crazy amounts of body weight reps and six miles every other day now after the challenge. Yes, I'm still doing it. They call it the smart muscle stimulator since the app that goes with it is amazing. It has 15 programs for different body parts and guides you through everything you need to do. I take recovery really seriously these days and PowerDot has been a powerful addition to stretching, ice, massage, and sleep and diet. It's used by professional athletes and by slightly insane, but mostly normal people like me. It's portable, so you can throw it in a bag and bring it anywhere. Get it at powerdot.com/lex and use code LEX at checkout to get 20% off on top of the 30-day free trial, and of course to support this podcast. This show is presented by a sponsor that arguably made this whole podcast even possible. Our first sponsor, the great, the powerful Cash App, the number one finance app in the App Store. I will forever be grateful to them for sponsoring this podcast. They're awesome people, awesome company, awesome product. Okay, back to the read. When you get it (laughs) , use code LEXPODCAST. Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy Bitcoin, invest in the stock market with as little as $1. Since Cash App allows you to buy Bitcoin, let me mention that cryptocurrency and the context of the history of money is fascinating. I recommend The Scent of Money is a great book on this history. Debits and credits on ledgers started around 30,000 years ago. Time flies. (laughs) The US dollar created over 200 years ago, and the first decentralized cryptocurrency released just over 10 years ago. So given that history, cryptocurrency is still very much in its early days of development, but it's still aiming to, and just might, redefine the nature of money. So again, if you get Cash App from the App Store or Google Play and use code LEXPODCAST, you get $10 and Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST, an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now here's my conversation with Sara Seager.
- 5:32 – 9:55
Falling in love with the stars
- LFLex Fridman
When did you first fall in love with the stars?
- SSSara Seager
I think I've always loved the stars. One of my first memory is of the moon. I remember watching the moon and I was in the car with my dad, who, my parents were divorced, and he was driving me and my siblings to his house for the weekend and the moon was just following me. Just had no idea why that was.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah. So, like, loo- looking up at the sky and there's this glowing thing. How do you make sense of the moon that, at- at that age?
- SSSara Seager
At that age, at, like, age five there's just no way you can. I think it's one of the great things about being a kid. It's just that curiosity that- that all kids have.
- LFLex Fridman
You know, I was thinking, 'cause there's these, um...... uh, almost, uh, out there ideas of, of, that, uh, earth is flat, uh, floating about on the internet. And it made me think, you know, when did I first realize that the earth is, um, like this ball that's, uh, flying through empty space. I mean, it's terrifying. It's, uh, awe-inspiring. I don't know how to make sense of it. It's, uh ...
- SSSara Seager
It's hard, 'cause we live in our frame of reference here on this planet.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- SSSara Seager
It's nearly impossible. None of us are lucky to go to see the curvature of Earth.
- LFLex Fridman
I mean, do you remember when you realized, understood like the physics, like the layout of the solar system? Is, is it, was it like ... Did you first have to take physics to really, uh, uh, like high school physics to really take that in?
- SSSara Seager
I think it's hard to say. I had this book when I was a child. It was in French. I grew up in Canada where French is supposedly taught to all of us English-speaking Canadians. And it was this French, book in French, but it was about the solar system. And I just loved flipping through it.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- SSSara Seager
It's hard to say how much, you know, you or I understand when we're kids. But it was really a great book.
- LFLex Fridman
What about the stars? When did you first learn about the stars?
- SSSara Seager
I have a, like I do have this very incredible distinctive memory. And again, it had to do with my dad. He took us camping. Now, my dad was from the UK, and he was the type who you'd find wearing a tie on weekends. So camping was not in his sphere-
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- SSSara Seager
... his comfort zone.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- SSSara Seager
We had a babysitter. Every summer we got a baby s- we, every summer we had a babysitter. And one summer we had Tom. He was barely older than, than we were. He was 14, my brother was 12. I would've been 11, or 10 maybe. And we went camping, 'cause Tom said, "Camping's the thing. We should, we should try it." And I just remember, I didn't aim to see the stars, but I walked out of my tent in the middle of the night, and I looked up, and wow, so many stars. The dark night sky and all those stars just like screaming at me. And I just couldn't believe that. Honestly, like my first thought was, "This is so incredible. Mind-blowing. Like, why wouldn't anyone have told me this existed?" (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) Can anyone else see this? (laughs)
- SSSara Seager
Have you, have you had an ex- uh, have you had an experience like that with anything? Like ...
- LFLex Fridman
You know, yeah. I've had that, I mean, th- I don't know if maybe you can tell me if it's the same. Uh, I've had that with robots. Uh, there's a few robots I met where I just fell in love with this like, "Is anyone else seeing this? Is, is anyone else seeing that here in a, in a robot is our ability to engineer some intelligent beings, intelligent beings that we could love, that could love us, that we can interact with in some rich ways that we haven't yet discovered?" Like, uh, almost like when you get a puppy. I used to have a dog. And there's this, uh, immediate bond and love. Um, and on top of that, ability to engineer it. It was, you know, I had to just pause and, and, and hold myself. I imagine, I don't have kids. I imagine there's a magic to that as well, where it's a co- totally new experience. It's like, "What?" (laughs)
- SSSara Seager
(laughs) Well, yeah. The stars, though, unlike kids or the puppy, it's only a good thing.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- SSSara Seager
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
So you felt ... You weren't terrified? Like, uh, 'cause to me when I look at the stars, it's almost paralyzingly scary how little we know about the universe, how alone we are. I j- I mean, somehow it feels alone. I'm not sure if it's, uh, it's just a matter of perspective. But it feels like, wow, there's billions of them out there, and we know nothing about them. And then also immediately to me somehow mortality comes into it. (laughs)
- SSSara Seager
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
I mean, how, how did that make you feel at that time?
- SSSara Seager
I think as a child without articulating it, I felt that same way.
- LFLex Fridman
That feeling.
- SSSara Seager
Just like, "Wow, this is terrifying. What's out there? Like, what is this? What does it mean about us here?"
- 9:55 – 15:27
Are we alone in the universe?
- LFLex Fridman
Uh, you, you're a scientist, an ex- a world-class scientist, planetary scientist, astronomer. Uh, now, I'm a bit of an idiot (laughs) who likes to ask silly questions. So some questions that are a little bit in the realm of speculation, almost philosophical, 'cause we know so little. And one of the awesome things about your work is you've actually put data and real science behind some of the biggest questions that we're all curious about. But nevertheless, many of the questions might be a little bit speculative. So on that topic (laughs) -
- SSSara Seager
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
... uh, just in your sense, do you think we're alone in the universe, human beings? Do you think there's life out there?
- SSSara Seager
Well, Lex, the funny thing is, is that as a scientist, I so don't even want to answer that.
- LFLex Fridman
You, do you really? (laughs)
- SSSara Seager
No. I will answer it though.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah. (laughs)
- SSSara Seager
But I just love to say-
- LFLex Fridman
You resist it naturally.
- SSSara Seager
Yeah, we naturally resist that-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- SSSara Seager
... because we want numbers and hard facts and not speculation. But I do love that question. It's a great question, and it's one we all wonder about. But I have to give you the scientist's answer first.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah, sure. (laughs)
- SSSara Seager
Which is, we'll have the capability to answer that question. Soon even, starting soon.
- LFLex Fridman
How do you define soon?
- SSSara Seager
How do I define soon?
- LFLex Fridman
What do you ... So much happened in the last 100 years.
- SSSara Seager
(laughs) Right, right.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- SSSara Seager
Right, right. And there's a difference, right, if it's 10 years or 20 years or 100 years. Yeah. Th- there's a difference in that. Well, soon could be a decade or two decades.
- LFLex Fridman
And the answer-
- SSSara Seager
By the way, journalists usually don't like that or the people want like tomorrow, they want the news. But what it's gonna take is telescopes, space telescopes, or very sophisticated ground or space teles- space telescopes to let us study the atmospheres of other planets far away and to look what's in the atmospheres and to look for water, which is needed for life as we know it, to look for gases that don't belong that we might attribute to life. So we have to do some really nitty-gritty astronomy.
- LFLex Fridman
So the, the promising way to answer this question scientifically is to look for hints of life. That's where like many of your ideas come in of what kind of hints why- might we actually see about this life?
- SSSara Seager
Right, right. That's exactly what we need to do. And I like the word you chose, hint. Because it's gonna be a hint. It's not gonna be a 100% yay, we found it. And then it will take future generations...... to do more careful work, to hopefully even find a way to send a probe to these distant exoplanets and to-
- LFLex Fridman
Check.
- SSSara Seager
... really figure this out for us.
- LFLex Fridman
I mean, we'll talk about the details. Tho- those are fun but like the z- the-
- SSSara Seager
Back to the speculation maybe?
- LFLex Fridman
The zoomed out big picture speculation question. (laughs)
- SSSara Seager
The zoomed out big picture is yes, I believe absolutely there is life out there somewhere.
- 15:27 – 27:48
Seager equation for number of habitable planets
- LFLex Fridman
the way, I mean maybe one way to talk about that is people know about the Drake equation, which is a very high level almost framework to think about what is the probability that, correct me if I'm wrong, that there's life out there. Uh, and intelligent life I think. I don't know. But then (laughs) you have an equation named after you now.
- SSSara Seager
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) Which, uh, I think nicely focuses in on the more, um, achievable and interesting, uh, part of that question which is on whether there is habitable planets out there or how many I guess-
- SSSara Seager
Right. Right. Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
... with habitable planets there.
- SSSara Seager
So the funny thing is was one time I met Frank Drake and I asked if he minded if I took his equation and kind of revamped it for this new field of exoplanet astronomy. He was totally cool with it. He's totally cool.
- LFLex Fridman
He got total approval? Well maybe, uh-
- SSSara Seager
Yeah. I think he did. Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
Okay. So sorry. I-
- SSSara Seager
I'm not sure if he'd actually read the stuff about my equation but he was cool with it. He was cool with it.
- LFLex Fridman
He was cool with it?
- SSSara Seager
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
Uh, okay. So I, I just said like 15 different things but maybe can you tell from your perspective what is the Drake equation and what is, sorry, the Seager equation?
- SSSara Seager
Sure. Well the Drake equation, as you said, it's a framework. It's a description of the number of civilizations out there of intelligent beings that are able to communicate with us by radio waves. So if you think of like the mo- if you think of the movie Contact, you've seen Contact right? We're hoping to get a, we're listening in actually, it's an active field of research listening to other stars at radio wavelengths hoping that some intelligent civilizations are sending us a message. And the Drake equation came like at the start of that whole field to put the factors down on paper to sort of illustrate what is involved to kind of estimating. And there's no real estimate or prediction of how many civilizations are out there, but it's a way to frame the question and show you each term that's involved. So I took the Drake equation and I called it a revised Drake equation and I recast it for the search for planets by more traditional astronomy means. We're looking at stars, looking for planets, looking for rocky planets, looking for planets that are the right temperature for life, looking for planets that might have life that outputs gases that we might detect in the future. It's the same spirit of the Drake equation. It's not gonna give us any magic numbers. It's not gonna say, "Hey, here's exactly what's out there." It's meant to kind of guide, guide of where we're going.
- LFLex Fridman
Although the Drake equation did, I mean the initial equation proposed actual numbers for those variables, right?
- SSSara Seager
Oh yes. The equation-
- LFLex Fridman
And some h-
- SSSara Seager
... proposed numbers and you can still put, plug your own numbers in. And there's this really cute website that lets you for both the Drake and my revised equation plug in some numbers and see what you get. So yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
So, okay, so what are, what are, I mean, eh, what are the variables, but maybe also what are, like, the critical variables?
- SSSara Seager
So in my equation, I set out to what are the numbers of inhabited planets that show signs of life by way of gasses in the atmosphere that can be attributed to life. I could just walk through the terms. It's-
- LFLex Fridman
Sure.
- SSSara Seager
... a lot simpler.
- LFLex Fridman
That- that's probably easier.
- SSSara Seager
So, the first thing I say is what are the number of stars available? And it's not that, those trillions and trillions of stars everywhere. It's what are available to, like, a specific search. And so for example, the MIT-led NASA mission tests is surveying the sky looking for all kinds of planets, but it can also, it also has stars. It has about 30,000 red dwarf stars. So we just take a number of stars that a given survey can access. So that's what the number of stars is. Then I wanted to know what kind of stars are, uh, quiet. And quiet, I called it fraction of those stars that is quiet. In the case of tests, the way it's looking for planets is planets that transit the star. They go in front of the star as seen from the telescope. But it turns out that some stars are very active. They're variable, and they brighten and dim with time, and that interferes with our observation.
- LFLex Fridman
I apologize to interrupt. So the transiting planet, so you're really looking for a black blob essentially that blocks the light. Uh-
- SSSara Seager
We're looking for a black blob that blocks the light. Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
And then trying to say something about the size of the planet, uh, from the frequency of that black blob's appearance and the size of that black blob and that kind of thing.
- SSSara Seager
Yeah. But let's just say that out of all the stars there are accessible to whatever telescope, some of them are just bad. For whatever reason, you're not gonna be able to find planets around them. So I need to know the fraction of those that are, that are good. So again, we have the number of stars, the fraction of them that we can actually find planets around. Um-
- LFLex Fridman
And by the way, is our sun s- one such, uh, is, is our sun quiet? (laughs)
- SSSara Seager
Our sun is quiet.
- 27:48 – 34:44
Exoplanets
- SSSara Seager
- LFLex Fridman
Okay. But how do you detect that type of gases that are on a planet from a distance?
- SSSara Seager
And that's, going back to that, that's what people were skeptical about. When I first started working on exoplanets, long time ago, people didn't believe we would ever, ever, ever study an exoplanet atmosphere of any kind. And now dozens of them are studied. There's a whole field of people, hundreds of people working on exoplanet atmospheres actually. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
Wow.
- SSSara Seager
And -
- LFLex Fridman
So first there was a point-
- SSSara Seager
Yes.
- LFLex Fridman
... where people didn't even know there was exoplanets. Right? When was the first exoplanet detected?
- SSSara Seager
The first exoplanet around a sunlike star anyway was detected in the mid-1990s.
- LFLex Fridman
That was a big deal. I kinda vaguely remember that.
- SSSara Seager
Well, at the time it was a big deal, but it was also incredibly controversial because in exo- you know, in planets, we only had one example of a planetary system, our own solar system. And in our solar system, Jupiter, our big massive planet, is really far from our star. And this first exoplanet around a sunlike star was incredibly close to its star. Its star. So close that people just couldn't believe it was a planet actually.
- LFLex Fridman
So maybe zoom out. What the heck is an exoplanet?
- SSSara Seager
An exoplanet is our name. (laughs) Like, is the name that we call a planet orbiting a star other than our sun.
- LFLex Fridman
Right. Extrasolar I guess is the another-
- SSSara Seager
You can call it extrasolar. Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
Okay.
- SSSara Seager
Exoplanet is simpler. But I think it's worth pausing to remember that each one of those stars out there in our night sky is a sun.
- LFLex Fridman
Right.
- SSSara Seager
And, you know, our sun has planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, et cetera. And so for a long time people have wondered, do those other stars or other suns have planets? And they do. And it appears that nearly every star has a planet, has a planet we call exoplanet. And there are thousands of known exoplanets already.
- LFLex Fridman
So there's already ... Yeah, like, there's so many things about space that it's hard to put in- into one's brain because it starts filling it with awe. S- so yeah, if you visualize the fact that the stars that we see in the sky aren't just stars, they're like, they're suns and they very likely as you're saying will have planets around them. There's all these planets roaming about in this, like, dimly lit darkness with potentially, uh, life. I mean, it's just mind-blowing but, um, may- maybe can you give a brief, like, history of an- like, of discovering all the exoplanets? So, so there was no exoplanets in the '90s (laughs) and then there's a lot of exoplanets now. So how did that come about?
- SSSara Seager
So many, so many planets.How did it come about? Well-
- LFLex Fridman
And, and what... And maybe another way to ask is what is the methodology that was used to discover them?
- SSSara Seager
I can say that. But I'd like to just say something else first where... So in exoplanets, you know, the line between what is considered completely crazy and what is considered mainstream research-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- SSSara Seager
... legit, it's constantly shifting.
- LFLex Fridman
This is awesome. Yeah.
- SSSara Seager
So before, when I started o- on exoplanets, it was still sketchy. Like, it wasn't considered a career or a thing, a place where you should be investing.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- SSSara Seager
And right now, now today, it's so many people are working in this field. A good, I don't know, at least a thousand, probably more. I don't know if that sounds like a lot to you, but it's a lot.
- LFLex Fridman
No, yeah.
- 34:44 – 40:43
Earth-like exoplanets
- SSSara Seager
- LFLex Fridman
So we, we mentioned exoplanets. What about Earth-like or... I don't know what the right distinction is of is it habitable or is it Earth-like planets, but what are those different categories and how can we tell the difference and detect each?
- SSSara Seager
Right. Right. So we're not at Earth-like planets yet. All the planets we're finding are so different from what we have in our solar system. They're just easier planets to find. But like-
- LFLex Fridman
In which way?
- SSSara Seager
For example, there could be a Jupiter-sized planet where an Earth should be. We find planets that are the same size as Earth but are orbiting way closer to their star than Mercury is to our sun.
- LFLex Fridman
So s-
- SSSara Seager
And they're so close that... Because close to a star means they also orbit faster and some of these hot super-Earths we call them, their year, their time to go around their star is less than a day.
- LFLex Fridman
Huh. Huh.
- NANarrator
(laughs)
- SSSara Seager
And they're heated-
- LFLex Fridman
Super-Earth.
- SSSara Seager
... so much by their star, they're heated so much by the star, we think the surface is hot enough to melt rock. So instead of running out by the bay or the river, you'll have like liquid lava. There will be liquid lava lakes on these planets we think.
- LFLex Fridman
And life can't survive the-
- SSSara Seager
Way too hot. The molecules for life would just be... Molecules needed for life just wouldn't, wouldn't be able to survive those temperatures. We have some other planets... One of the most mysterious things out there, factoid if you will, is that the most common type of planet we know about so far is a planet that's in between Earth and Neptune size. It's two to three times the size of Earth. And we have no solar system counterpart of that planet. That is like going outside to the forest and finding some kind of creature or animal that just no one has ever seen before and then discovering that is the most common thing out there.
- LFLex Fridman
Huh.
- SSSara Seager
And so we're not even sure what they are. We have a lot of thoughts as to the different types of planet it could be, but people don't really know.
- LFLex Fridman
I mean, what are your thoughts about what it could be?
- SSSara Seager
Well, one thought, and this is more when we want to be rather than might be, is that these so-called mini Neptunes we call them, (laughs) that they are water worlds, that they could be scaled up versions of Jupiter's icy moons such that they are planets that are made m- of more than half of water by mass.
- LFLex Fridman
So, w- yeah, and what's the connection between water and life and the possibility of seeing that from a gas perspective?
- SSSara Seager
Okay, so all life on Earth needs liquid water. And so there's been this idea in astronomy or astrobiology for a long time called follow the water. Find water, that will give you a chance of finding life.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- SSSara Seager
But we could still zoom out and the kind of, the community consensus is that we need some kind of liquid for life to originate and to survive because molecules have to react. If you don't have a way that molecules can interact with each other, you can't really make anything. And so when we think of all the liquids out there, water is the most abundant liquid in terms of planetary materials. There really aren't that many liquids. Like I mentioned liquid rock, way too hot for life.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- SSSara Seager
We have some really cold liquids like, uh, almost gasoline, like ethane and methane lakes that have been found on s- one of Saturn's moons, Titan. That's so cold though. And for exo-planets, we can't study really cold planets 'cause they're just simply too dark and too cold. So we usually, so we usually are just left with looking for planets with liquid water. And to your point, it's... You remember as you... We talked about how planets are less than a pixel in, in that way to say, so we can't see oceans on a planet. We're not gonna see continents and oceans, not yet anyway. But we can see gases in the atmosphere and if it's a small rocky planet, and this is going into some more detail, is the small- if we see a small rocky planet with water vapor in the atmosphere, we're pretty sure that means there has to be a liquid water reservoir because it's not intuitive in any way, but water is broken up by ultraviolet radiation from the star or from the sun. And on most planets when water is broken up into H and O, the H, the hydrogen will escape to space 'cause just like when you think of a child letting go of a helium-filled balloon-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- SSSara Seager
... it floats upwards and hydrogen's a light gas and will leave from Earth s- leave from the planet. So ultimately if you have water, unless there's an ocean, like a way to keep replenishing water vapor in the atmosphere, that water vapor should be destroyed by ultraviolet radiation.
- LFLex Fridman
Got it, so there's a... Okay, so th- there's a need for a liquid. I mean, I guess w- is water... Well, is water essential or is it other liquids? I mean, the chemistry here is probably super complicated.
- SSSara Seager
Well, there's not... It does, but you know, there's not an infinite number of liquids.
- LFLex Fridman
Right.
- SSSara Seager
There's maybe like five liquids that can exist inside or on the surface of a planet and water is the one that exists for the largest range of temperatures and pressures and it's also the easiest type of planet for us to find and study, is one with water vapor, rather than a cold planet that has ethane and methane lakes.
- 40:43 – 52:34
Intelligent life
- SSSara Seager
that's it.
- LFLex Fridman
Okay, let's- let's go into land of speculation. Uh, what about intelligent life? Uh, us humans consider ourselves intelligent, uh, surprisingly, uh, or unsurprisingly. W- do you think about from your perspective of looking at planets from a gas composition perspective, uh, and in general of how we might see intelligent life and, uh, your intuition about whether that life is even out there?
- SSSara Seager
Think the life is out there somewhere, the huge numbers of stars and planets. I like to think that life had a chance to evolve to be intelligent. I'm not convinced the life is anywhere near here only because if it's hard for intelligent life to evolve, then it will be far away by definition.
- LFLex Fridman
Well, the sad thing is, uh, maybe from the artificial intelligence perspective is it makes me sad there might be intelligent life out there that we're just not... Like the pathways of evolution can go in all these different directions where we might not be able to communicate with it or even know that it- or even detect its intelligence or even comprehend its intelligence.
- SSSara Seager
Yeah, I agree.
- LFLex Fridman
I'm convinced cats are more intelligent than humans.
- SSSara Seager
Yeah. Um-
- LFLex Fridman
That, uh, that we're just not able to comprehend the, the measures, the- the proper measures of their intelligence.
- SSSara Seager
My dog is so funny. He's a golden doodle. His name's Leo. We joke that he's either a really dumb dog, and so he's not here to defend himself, but he's either really dumb or he's a super genius just pretending to be dumb.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah. I mean, it's possible-
- SSSara Seager
He could-
- LFLex Fridman
... he's, he's a s- multi-dimensional projection of alien life, uh, here monitoring, uh, one of the, you know, one of the top scientists in the world trying to find aliens just to make sure, just, just to make sure that humans don't get out of hand.
- SSSara Seager
It's funny. Oh, I'm definitely gonna go and, and ask him, ask him about that. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- SSSara Seager
Uh, ask him about that one again.
- LFLex Fridman
All right, she's onto something.
- SSSara Seager
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah. What might we look for in terms of signs of intelligent life?From your toolkit, do you think there are things that we should ... We might be able to use or maybe in the next couple of decades discover that would be different than life that's like bacteria, that's primitive life?
- SSSara Seager
I still love SETI, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. I like to hope that if there is a civilization out there, they're trying to send us a message. I think w- like, think about it. I don't know. What are your thoughts? Like, if you think about our Earth, there's no structure we've built that intelligent civilizations could see from far away. There's literally nothing. Not even the Great Wall of China. And so to think, like, why would this other civilization build a giant structure that we could see?
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah. So with SETI, the idea is that we're both trying to hear signals and send signals, right? Or ...
- SSSara Seager
Well, we haven't sent one. They call that METI, messaging.
- LFLex Fridman
METI.
- SSSara Seager
And there's a big kind of fear over METI because do you want to tell them you're here?
- LFLex Fridman
Huh. Yeah.
- SSSara Seager
It's kind of this, like, let's wait till they call us.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah. (laughs)
- SSSara Seager
And so ... Uh, we should be, though.
- LFLex Fridman
It's like the dating game. We have to ... Like, h- how, how many days do I wait before I call kind of thing.
- SSSara Seager
Yes, it is.
- LFLex Fridman
Okay. (laughs)
- 52:34 – 55:09
Number of planets per star
- LFLex Fridman
Maybe, uh, getting a sense of numbers, uh, how many stars are there in, um, maybe... I don't know what the radius that's reasonable to think about. I don't know if the observable universe is like way too big to think about. But in terms of when we think about how many habitable planets there are, what are the numbers we're working with? In- in your sense. What are the scale of them?
- SSSara Seager
Honestly, the numbers are probably like billions of trillions.
- LFLex Fridman
Of stars?
- SSSara Seager
Yeah. You know, in the UK, I think, I don't know if we do that here, but they will call a billion trillion, where you put like one billion followed by a trillion.
- LFLex Fridman
Ah, yeah.
- SSSara Seager
Yeah, it's kind of weird. But here, I don't even know how to say the number 10 to the 20. Like, if you know what that is, that's one followed by 20 zeros. That's a big number.
- LFLex Fridman
And per star-
- SSSara Seager
We don't have a name for that number. There's so many. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) Per star, I think we kinda mentioned this, is there a good sense... There's probably argument about this, but per star, how many planets are there? Is- is there a con-
- SSSara Seager
We don't have that number yet, per se. You know, we're not really there. But some people think that there's many planets per star. The- there's this analogy of filling the coffee cup. Like, you know, you don't usually just pour one drop, you fill it. And that planetary systems, we see stars being born that have a disc of gas and dust, and that ultimately forms planets. So the idea, the kind of concept is that planets, so many planets form, too many. And eventually some get kicked out and you're left with like a full planetary system, a dynamically full system. And so there have to be a lot, 'cause so many form and a bunch survive.
- LFLex Fridman
That, I mean, that- that makes perfect intuitive sense, right?
- SSSara Seager
Right, right.
- LFLex Fridman
Like, why wouldn't that happen?
- SSSara Seager
Right. Well, there's other thoughts too, though. These big planets that are really close to the star, we think they formed far away from the star where there's enough material to form, and they migrated inwards.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- SSSara Seager
And some of these planets migrating inwards due to interaction with other planets or with the disc itself, they may have cleared it out, like kicked other planets out of the system. So there's a lot of ideas floating around. We're not entirely sure.
- LFLex Fridman
And what about Earth-like planets? Is that, that's another level of uncertainty that-
- SSSara Seager
It's a level of uncertainty. If we think of an Earth-like planet being an Earth around a sun in the same orbit, an Earth-like planet being an Earth-sized planet in an Earth-like orbit about a sun like star, we're not there yet. You know, we're not able to detect enough of those to- to give you a hard number. Some people ex- have extrapolated...And they will say as many as one in five stars like our sun could be hosting a true Earth-like planet.
- 55:09 – 57:36
Space exploration
- SSSara Seager
- LFLex Fridman
Wow. On the topic of space exploration, there's been a lot of exciting developments with NASA, with SpaceX, with other companies, uh, successfully, uh, getting rockets into space with humans and getting them to land back, uh, especially with SpaceX. What are your thoughts about Elon Musk and SpaceX, Crew Dragon, while working t- with NASA to launch astronauts? What's your sense about, uh, these exciting new developments?
- SSSara Seager
Well, SpaceX and other so-called commercial companies are only good news for my field, because they're lowering the cost of getting to space by having reusable rockets. It's just been, it's incredible, and we need cheaper access to space. So from a very practical viewpoint, it's all good. About getting people, there's this dream that we have to go to Mars, boots on Mars.
- LFLex Fridman
Boots on Mars. (laughs)
- SSSara Seager
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
I, what do you think-
- SSSara Seager
So-
- LFLex Fridman
... about that? You mentioned probes.
- SSSara Seager
Boots on Mars.
- LFLex Fridman
What's the value of humans? Uh, is that interesting to you from both a scientific and a human perspective?
- SSSara Seager
Human mostly. I think it's such in our desire to explore.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- SSSara Seager
It's part of what it means to be human, so wanting to go to another planet and, and be able to live there for some time, it's just, just what it means to be human. You know, oftentimes in science and engineering, big huge discoveries are made when we didn't intend to. So often this kind of pure exploratory type of research or this pure exploration research, it can lead to something really important, like the laser. We couldn't really live without that now. At the grocery, you scan your foods. There's surgery that involve l- involves lasers. GPS, we all use our GPS. We don't have GPS 'cause someone thought, "Hey, it'd be great to have a navigation system." And so I do support, I do. I just, but I really think it comes primarily just from the desire to explore.
- LFLex Fridman
Do you think something... there's a lot of criticism and a lot of excitement about Mars. Uh, do you think there's value in trying to, uh, go t- put humans on Mars, first of all, and second of all, colonize Mars? Do you think there's something interesting that might come from there?
- SSSara Seager
I, I'm convinced there will be something interesting. I just don't know what it is yet. But I don't think, I don't think having some commercial value or value in the metric of something useful is really what's motivating us.
- LFLex Fridman
So really, uh, you see exploration as a long-term investment into something awesome that eventually will be commercial value.
- SSSara Seager
Yeah. I do actually.
- 57:36 – 1:00:52
Traveling to Proxima Centauri
- SSSara Seager
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- SSSara Seager
I do.
- LFLex Fridman
So what about visiting... Okay, I apologize, but I mean, there's an exciting longing to, um, visit Earth-like planets elsewhere. So what's the closest, uh, Earth-like planet you think w- is worth visiting? And how h- how hard is it?
- SSSara Seager
Wow, it is very hard. I mean, our nearest call it Earth-mass planet, it's orbiting a star very different from our own sun, an M dwarf star, a small red star, Proxima Centauri. It's over four light years away, and we can't travel at the speed of light. We can't even tr- I mean, it would take tens of thousands of years to get there with conventional methods. So you know the movies, like-
- LFLex Fridman
Multi-generationally.
- SSSara Seager
... multi-generationally. Have, yeah, this movie Passenger, have you seen that movie, Passenger?
- LFLex Fridman
No.
- SSSara Seager
It's about a big spaceship that is traveling to another planet, and everyone's hibernating. I won't give you the spoiler alert 'cause one person wakes up, and then it's kind of a problem.
- LFLex Fridman
Okay, got it.
- SSSara Seager
(laughs) .
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- SSSara Seager
But, uh, yeah, the multi-generational ships, I mean, when you think about where we're headed as a species, maybe we don't send people. Maybe we end up sending raw biological materials and instructions to print out humans. It sounds kind of far-fetched, but already we're printing, like, liver cells in the lab and beating heart cells. We're starting to reconstruct body parts. I mean, the thing is, it is so hard to get to another planet that this thought of printing humans or printing life forms actually could be easier.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah, that's somehow so sad (laughs) to think, to think of the idea that we would launch a successful spaceship that has multi-generational, like, non-human life, and it's gonna reach other intelligent life. And by the time they figure out where it came from, human civilization will be extinct.
- SSSara Seager
Wow, yeah, that is really suffering.
- LFLex Fridman
I mean, that's, so that's one. Y- there's a tempting thing to think about, what are the possible trajectories? So, uh, you know, Elon keeps talking about multi, uh, planetary, us becoming a multi-planetary species. I mean, sure, Mars is a part of that, but, like, the dream is to really expand outside the solar system. And it's, it's not clear, just, like, uh, as you said, like, what the actual scientific engineering steps that are required to, to take. It seems, like, so daunting.
- SSSara Seager
Right.
- LFLex Fridman
So daunting. So, like, the s- the smart thing seems to be to do the most achievable near daunting task, even if there doesn't seem to be a commercial application, which I think is colonizing Mars. But, like, from your perspective, is there some Manhattan Project style huge project in space that, uh, we might wanna take on? And you've had roles, you had scientist hat roles, and then you also had roles in terms of being on, like, committees and stuff determining where funding goes and so on.
- SSSara Seager
Right.
- LFLex Fridman
So, like, is there a huge, like, multi-trillion, we've been throwing the T word around-
- SSSara Seager
Yeah, okay, right, right.
- LFLex Fridman
... recently a lot, but these huge projects that we might wanna take on?
- 1:00:52 – 1:07:34
Starshade
- LFLex Fridman
- SSSara Seager
Well, first of all, we wanna find the planets like Earth first. Like, just even finding those Earth-like planets is a billion-dollar endeavor, billions of dollars endeavor. And that's so hard because an Earth is so small, so less massive, and so faint compared to our sun.It's the proverbial needle in a haystack, but worse. And we need very sophisticated space-based telescopes to be able to find these planets and to look, look at them and see which ones have water and which ones have signs of life on them.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah, the, the Starshade project that you're part of.
- SSSara Seager
Starshade.
- LFLex Fridman
Starshade, yeah. It's probably the most badass thing I've ever seen.
- SSSara Seager
Right. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- SSSara Seager
You know what's interesting-
- LFLex Fridman
Can you describe what it is, first off? (laughs)
- SSSara Seager
Yeah. Tell you about Starshade. So, what's amazing about Starshade is it was first conceived of in the 1960s.
- LFLex Fridman
Hmm.
- SSSara Seager
Imagine that. And revisited every decade until now when we think we can actually build it. And Starshade is a giant, specially-shaped screen. It is about... There's different versions of it, but think about 30 meters in diameter.
- LFLex Fridman
So you're blocking out the sun.
- SSSara Seager
You're effectively blocking out the star.
- LFLex Fridman
Th- yeah.
- SSSara Seager
So that you can see the planet directly. And Starshade would have a spacecraft attached to it and it would fly in space far away from Earth's gravity, and it would have to formation fly with the space telescope. So the idea is that Starshade blocks out the starlight in a very careful way, and it has to block that starlight out so that the planet that is 10 billion times fainter than the star, that only the planet light goes to the telescope.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah, so in formation, meaning the telescope flies in, um... 'Cause you've given a presentation on this, but, like, it, it would fly, like, in, um... Thi- this is extremely high precision endeavor. (laughs)
- SSSara Seager
Yeah. We had this analogy, like, of asking a friend to hold up a dime five miles away.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- SSSara Seager
Perfectly, like at the perfect line of sight with you.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah. That's... (laughs) And the shape of it is pretty cool. I mean, uh, I don't know exactly what the physics of that, like what the optics are that require that shape.
- SSSara Seager
I can tell you. It turns out that if you block out a star, imagine blocking out a star with a circul- circularly or a square-shaped screen. You wouldn't actually be blocking it, because the star acts like a wave. The starlight can act like a wave, and it would actually bend around the edges of the screen. And so instead of blocking out the light, you're expecting to see nothing, you would see ripples.
- LFLex Fridman
Hmm.
- SSSara Seager
And the analogy that I love to give, it's like throwing a pebble in a pond. You know, you get those ripples, you get these concentric ripples and they go out, and light would do something quite similar. You'd actually see ripples of light. And those ripples of light, they're actually way brighter than the planet we'd be looking for.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- SSSara Seager
So, we can't
- LFLex Fridman
Okay, so they would introduce-
- SSSara Seager
put a circums-
- LFLex Fridman
... this noise that's, uh-
- SSSara Seager
Yeah, noise. And so the Starshade, it's like a mathematical solution to the problem of diffraction, it's called.
- 1:07:34 – 1:09:44
Using the sun as a gravitational lens
- LFLex Fridman
- SSSara Seager
Really cool. So there's two other topics that aren't mine, but I still love them.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- SSSara Seager
One of them, let's just talk about it briefly.
- LFLex Fridman
Sure.
- SSSara Seager
'Cause it's not a probe, but it's the idea to send a telescope very far away, to 500 times the Earth-sun distance, and this is way farther than the Voyager spacecrafts are right now. And to use our sun as a gravitational lens, to use our sun to magnify something that's behind it. That's gotta sink in for a minute. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah, ex- exactly. Um, well, I mean-
- SSSara Seager
Um ... (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
... I, I don't know what the physics of that is, like how to use the sun.
- SSSara Seager
In astronomy, and Einstein thought about this initially, we can use, uh, massive objects bend space.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- SSSara Seager
And so light that should be traveling, like, straight, it actually travels around the warped space.
- LFLex Fridman
And somehow you figure out a way to use that for magnification?
- SSSara Seager
You have a way to use that for magnification, that's right. There are galaxies, uh, that are lens, so-called gravitational lens, by intervening galaxy clusters actually. And there are microlensing events, where stars get magnified as an unseen gravitational lens star passes in between us and that very distant star. It's actually a real tool in astronomy. Yeah, using gravitational lensing-
- LFLex Fridman
That's amazing.
- SSSara Seager
... to magnify because it bends more rays towards you than normally would, than you'd normally see.
- LFLex Fridman
And again, we're trying to get more higher resolution images that are basically boiled down to light.
- SSSara Seager
Well, it boils down to light, exactly.
- LFLex Fridman
A- and then you can maybe get more information about ...
- SSSara Seager
Well, in this case, you would ask me, let's say, if this thing could get built, it would take, like, something, like, they would like to say 25 years to get from here to there.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- SSSara Seager
25 years, and then it could send some information back to us. And then you'd say, "So Sara, how many pixels?" And I wouldn't say, "One or less than one." I'd say, "You know, could be like 10 by 10 pixels, could be 100 pixels," which would be awesome. So-
- LFLex Fridman
I mean, that's still crazy that we can get a lot of information from that.
- SSSara Seager
Crazy, right? And it's crazy for a lot of other reasons because again you have to line up the sun and your target.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- SSSara Seager
You'd only have one telescope per target 'cause every star is behind the sun in a different way. So it's a lot of complicated things,
- 1:09:44 – 1:12:45
Starshot
- SSSara Seager
but-
- LFLex Fridman
What about the second?
- SSSara Seager
The second one, it's called Starshot. You know star shot means like big dreams.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- SSSara Seager
And it's an initiative by the Breakthrough Foundation. And Starshot is the concept to send thousands of little tiny spacecraft, which they now call StarChip. So instead of starship, it's StarChip. And there's a little chip, and the StarChip ... So like sending, like thousands of little turtles being born, they're not all gonna make it.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- SSSara Seager
They'll use this on lots of them. And each of these StarChips, uh, once they're launched into, I guess low Earth orbit, they will deploy a solar sail that's a few meters in diameter. And the idea is that on Earth, we would have a bank of ... This one is still a bit on the other side of the line, but ...
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- SSSara Seager
So we'd have a bank of telescopes with lasers. They'd be like a gigawatt power. And these lasers would momentarily shine upwards and accelerate. They'd hit these sails, they'd be like a power source for the sail, and would accelerate the sails to travel at about a twentieth the speed of light. And they would-
- LFLex Fridman
Is that, is that as, uh, crazy as it sounds? (laughs) I mean ...
- SSSara Seager
Well, like, like any good, well, like any good engineering project, it has to be broken down into the crazy parts.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- SSSara Seager
And the Breakthrough initiative, like to their huge credit, is sponsoring, you know, getting over these ... Actually, they've listed, initially they listed 19 challenges.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- SSSara Seager
So it's broken down to concrete things. Like one of them is, well, you have to buy the land and make sure the airspace is okay with you sending up that much power overhead. Another one is you have to have material on the sail where the lasers won't just, uh, vaporize it. (laughs) And well, so there's a lot of, a lot of issues. But anyway, these sails would be accelerated to twenty the speed of light, and their journey to the nearest star would now, wouldn't, would no longer be tens of thousands of years, but could be 20 years. Okay 20? So it's not, not as bad as tens of thousands.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- SSSara Seager
And this, um, these thousands or whatever, however many make it, they'll go by the nearest star system and snap a few, snap some images, and radio the information back to Earth. Because they're traveling so fast, they can't slow down, but they'll zoom by, take some photos, send it back.
- LFLex Fridman
Hi-res.
- SSSara Seager
Yeah. But see just what I want you-
- LFLex Fridman
That's awesome. This is awesome, yeah.
- SSSara Seager
... to pause on for a second is that just by making that a real concept, and the money given won't make it happen, but will ... But what it's done is it's planted the seed, and it's shifted that line from what is crazy to what is a real project. It's shifted it just ever so slightly enough I think to plant the seed that we have to find a way to somehow find a way to get there.
- LFLex Fridman
That is, again, to stay on that, that is so powerful. Take a big crazy idea and break it down into smaller crazy ideas, order it in a list, and (laughs) knock it out one at a time. Uh, I, I don't know that, I've, I've never heard anything more inspiring from an engineering (laughs) perspective 'cause that's how you solve the impossible
- 1:12:45 – 1:15:44
Rogue planets
- LFLex Fridman
things. So you open your new book, uh, discussing Rogue Planet PSO J318, I never said this out loud, .522. So A Rogue Planet, which is just this poetic beautiful vision of a planet that, um, that as you write, "lurches across the galaxy like a rudderless ship wrapped in perpetual darkness. Its surface swept by constant storms, its black skies raining molten iron."Just, like, the vision of that, the scary, the, the darkness, the ... just how not pleasant it is for human life. Just th- the intensity of that, uh, metaphor, I don't know. And the reason you use that is to paint an, um, a feeling of loneliness, I think.
- SSSara Seager
And despair.
- LFLex Fridman
And despair. And, um, why ... Maybe on the planet side, why does it feel ... Maybe it's just me. Why does it feel so profoundly lonely on that kind of planet? Like what, um, like what are-
- SSSara Seager
I think it's because we all want to be a part of something, a part of a family, or a part of a community, or a part of something. And so our solar system, and by the way, I only... It's sort of like a, like when you treat yourself to, like, eating an entire t- tub of ice cream. Like, I sometimes treat myself to imagine things like this and not just be so cut-and-dried. But when you imagine that, this planet's not par- 'cause I don't want to give emotions to a planet per se, but the planet's not part of anything. It's somehow prob- um, it's just all on its own, just kind of out there without that warm energy from its sun. It's just all alone out there.
- LFLex Fridman
To me, it was this little discovery that I actually feel pretty good bei- being part of the solar system. It felt like we have a sun. We have, like, a little family.
- SSSara Seager
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
And it felt like it sucked for the rogue planet-
- SSSara Seager
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
... to just floating about. I mean, uh, not floating. Uh, flying, uh, rudderless. By the way, how many rogue planets are there j- in your sense?
- SSSara Seager
We don't know totally. I mean, there's some rogue planets that are just born on their own. I know that sounds really weird to be, "How can you be born an orphan?"
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- SSSara Seager
But they just are. (laughs) Because most planets are born out of a disc of gas and dust around a star. But some of these small planets are, like, totally failed stars. They're so failed, they're just small planets on their own. But we think that there's probably, honestly, there's another path to a rogue planet, and that's one that's been kicked out of its star system by other planets, like a game of billiard balls. Something just gets kicked out. We actually think there's probably as many rogue planets as stars.
- LFLex Fridman
They're all flying out there, um, fundamentally alone.
- 1:15:44 – 1:30:15
The Smallest Lights in the Universe
- LFLex Fridman
So the book is, uh, is a memoir, is about your life, and it, uh, weaves both your fascination with planets outside the solar system and the path of your life. And you lost your husband, which is a kind of central part of the book, uh, th- that, uh, created a feeling of the rogue planet. By the way, what's the name of the book?
- SSSara Seager
The name of the book is The Smallest Lights in the Universe.
- LFLex Fridman
Wh- what's up with the title? What's the meaning?
- SSSara Seager
Well, the title has a double meaning. On the face of it, it's the search for other Earths. Earths are so dim compared to the big, bright, massive star beside them. Searching for the Earths is like searching for the smallest lights in the universe. But it has this other meaning too. I really hope that you or the other people listening never get to the place where you're just, you've fallen off the cliff into this horrible place of huge despair. And once in a while, you get a glimmer of a better life, of some kind of hope, and those are also the smallest lights in the universe.
- LFLex Fridman
Well, maybe we can tell the full story before we talk about the glimmer of hope, um. What did it feel like, uh, to first find out that your husband, Mike, was sick?
- SSSara Seager
It was incredibly frustrating. Like, lots of us have had some kind of problem that the doctors completely ignore. And just that they kept blowing him off, "It's nothing." Are they paid to just say (laughs) it's nothing? I mean, it's just insane. I was just so angry. And we finally got to a point where he was really sick. He was, like, in bed, not able to move basically. And it turned out all the things they ignored and not done any tests, he had, like, a 100% blockage in his intestine. Like, 100%. Like, nothing could get out, nothing could get in. And it was pretty, pretty shocking to even hear then that it could be nothing.
- LFLex Fridman
What was the progression of it in the context of the, maybe the medical system, the doctors? I mean, what did it feel like?
- SSSara Seager
Like he-
- LFLex Fridman
Did you feel like a human being? Um ...
- SSSara Seager
I felt like a child. Like, the doctors were trying to water down the real diagnosis or treat us like we couldn't know the truth or they didn't know. You know? I felt mixed. Like, it's not a good situation if you think the doctor either has no idea what he or she is doing or if the doctor's purposely, let's just say, lying to you to sugarcoat it. Like, I didn't know which one of it it was, but I knew it was one of those.
- LFLex Fridman
What, what were, what were the things he was suffering from?
- SSSara Seager
Well, initially, he just had a random stomach ache. I hate to say (laughs) that out, out loud because I know a lot of people will have a random stomach ache.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- SSSara Seager
But, so he just had a bad stomach ache, and then, "Hmm, this is weird." A few days later, another bad stomach ache. Kinda gets worse. Might go away for a few weeks, might come back. And at the time, all I knew was my dad had had that same thing. Not the same identical system, but he had these really weird pains, and he ended up having the worst diagnosis. One of the worst diagnoses you can get from a random stomach ache is pancreatic cancer. Because the time ... The pancreas, like, you can't feel anything. So by the time you feel pain, it's too late. It's spread already. So I was just, like, beside myself. I'm like, this is like, wow. This guy, he's got random stomach ache. All I know is another man I loved had a random stomach ache and it didn't end well.
- LFLex Fridman
How did you deal with it emotionally, psychologically, intellectually, as a scientist? What was that like? That, that whole ... 'cause it's not immediate. It's a, it's a long journey.
- SSSara Seager
It's not immediate. It's a long journey and you don't know where the diagnosis is going, so anyone who's suffered from a major illness, there's, like, always branches in the road. So, you know, he had this intestinal blockage. Like, I can't imagine someone in their 40s having that and that being normal. But the doctor's like, "It could be nothing. Could just cut it out. You don't need most of your intestine. It's a repeating pattern. Just cut that out. It could be fine." But it ended up not being fine and he was diagnosed as being terminally ill. Well, it really changed my life in a huge way. First of all, I remember immediately one summer, the summer when this happened, I started asking everyone I knew. I would ask you. I don't know, it's not my job to put you on the spot.
Episode duration: 1:41:34
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