Re:Thinking with Adam GrantSearching for life on other planets with astrophysicist Sara Seager | ReThinking
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
30 min read · 5,572 words- 0:00 – 0:25
Star party wonder and the spark of curiosity about other worlds
- SSSara Seager
When I was a small child, my dad took me to a star party. That's not like where the Hollywood stars are, but it's where amateur astronomers have their telescopes out. So I remember seeing the moon for the first time. It's like a whole other world, and I just w- thought, "Wow, what is out there?" It's so huge and vast and magnificent. You know, whatever's out there beyond Earth. [upbeat music]
- 0:25 – 0:51
The chalkboard behind her: transit equations and how exoplanets get found
- AGAdam Grant
Sara, is that the Good Will Hunting chalkboard behind you?
- SSSara Seager
Well, it is MIT, so...
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs] It's on brand. What, what are those equations?
- SSSara Seager
Well, these equations describe exoplanets that fortuitously are aligned in a way that they go in front of the star as seen from our viewpoint, and we call these transiting planets, and it's the main way we discover exoplanets today.
- AGAdam Grant
I have so many questions for you about this, but before we get there, take me back to your origin story. How did you end up in this field?
- 0:51 – 2:01
A difficult childhood, distrust of authority, and openness to wild ideas
- SSSara Seager
So my origin story, I always loved the night sky and, you know, coupled to that, I had a very quirky childhood. I lived with my mother and stepfather, and my stepfather was literally like a mean monster who mentally tortured me. And at the same time, um, my dad, who I lived with on weekends, even though he was an educated man, he believed in crazy things like he adored me so much he told me he believed in reincarnation and that we would come back to this earth together like again and again as like business partners or brothers or something. And so there I was, like at 11 years old, going to the library, taking out a stack of books to kind of sort through this on my own. So what I got out of my childhood was, because of my stepfather, like a distrust of authority, and because of my dad, openness to crazy ideas that I could think through on my own. And wow, what a winning combination for science.
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs]
- SSSara Seager
Because we have, we have to be able to challenge authority, and we have to entertain out there ideas and sort through what is possible.
- AGAdam Grant
Wow. So how did that take you to searching for exoplanets?
- 2:01 – 2:40
Choosing astronomy at the birth of exoplanet science—and embracing a risky thesis
- SSSara Seager
It sounds so cliché, and I don't know how I came to this like at a, such a young age in my early 20s, but life is short. You know, and if you find something you're good at that you love doing, you should go for it. So I decided to go to graduate school in astronomy, and when I was in graduate school in the mid 1990s, that's when exoplanets were first discovered and my PhD thesis advisor... I, I, by the way, was his first student, and he also... He only told me this a couple of decades later. He didn't realize that you shouldn't be giving a graduate student like an incredibly risky project, but I guess neither of us knew any better and we thought it was an amazing idea, so I jumped on the chance to work on these new exoplanets.
- 2:40 – 3:51
What exoplanets are—and how early expectations were wrong
- AGAdam Grant
So what is an exoplanet?
- SSSara Seager
An exoplanet is a planet that orbits a star other than the sun because in the night sky, all of those stars are suns, and if our sun has planets like Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, et cetera, it makes sense that other stars have planets also, and they do.
- AGAdam Grant
We didn't know this with much confidence, though, when you first got into the field, did we?
- SSSara Seager
Not at all. The evidence we had was that we can see stars being born, and around those stars we see disks of leftover stuff of gas and dust that we assumed formed planets. But when I first got into it, everyone thought that exoplanets would be like our solar system, like small planets close to the star with massive planets like Jupiter quite far from the star, and that's not what people found initially because our selection biases, what's easier to find are big planets close to the star. So it's not only that not much was known about them, but what was known wasn't believed. And then, I mean, slowly the evidence grew, but not after a lot of like back and forth, and eventually the evidence just became incontrovertible that exoplanets are real and they're incredibly different from our solar system.
- 3:51 – 4:50
How transit detection works at scale: tiny dips in starlight across millions of stars
- AGAdam Grant
How do you detect one?
- SSSara Seager
There's so many ways to detect exoplanets. The most common one today is by watching star brightnesses as a function of time. So to s- oversimplify, it would be like taking your phone and pointing it at a field in the s- night sky and just taking a picture over and over again, like for nights on end and years on end. And what we're looking for is a tiny drop in brightness because some planets, their orbits are aligned perfectly with our point of view, and so the planet goes in front of the star as seen from our viewpoint. And repeatedly every time it orbits its star, it goes in front of the star and there's a tiny, tiny drop in brightness. Like what you have to understand is we don't spatially resolve those stars. They're just points of light. Yet we can measure the drop in brightness precisely enough to find evidence of planets orbiting their star. But it's a rare occurrence to align just so, and that's why we have to stare at the night sky and look at hundreds of thousands, like to millions of stars at one time.
- 4:50 – 5:27
AI in exoplanet science: faster and more uniform, but not a paradigm shift (yet)
- AGAdam Grant
I can imagine then that AI has started to radically transform this detection process.
- SSSara Seager
Like yes and no. You know how there's two uses for AI? I'd say two uses in science. One is just to do our job better. So we can train AI with supervised learning or unsupervised learning and just get it to do a more uniform job more quickly. So not just doing what we can do better, but putting things together in a new way. For exoplanets, it's really done more of that first category, just done things that we can do better, faster or more thoroughly or just more efficiently or with a tiny bit more insight. It hasn't really found like a new path, a new way to do things.
- 5:27 – 7:48
Trillions of planets, awe at cosmic scale, and the probability debate about life
- AGAdam Grant
Do you have a sense of how many exoplanets might be out there?
- SSSara Seager
Trillions. Trillions in our galaxy alone. We have just scratched the surface. It's like we can meet our neighbors, but we can't meet the people on the other side of the globe. So literally every star appears to have a planetary system, and in our galaxy alone, there are hundreds of billions of stars. So wow, I mean, if every star has multiple planets, that's more than hundreds of billions.
- AGAdam Grant
I mean, that's just, uh, that, that's a, a number at a scale that is almost impossible to grasp.
- SSSara Seager
It is. It is almost impossible.
- AGAdam Grant
I, I can't even- ... picture a, a trillion of anything
- SSSara Seager
I know, but just think about that vast night sky. At the very darkest sky, if we had good eyesight, we could see only thousands of stars, and yet there are hundreds of billions out there in our galaxy alone, and hundreds of billions of galaxies.
- AGAdam Grant
That's incre- incredible.
- SSSara Seager
So if that doesn't make you feel like... If that doesn't make us feel insignificant, like, what does?
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs] Yeah. And I guess, you know, the other, the other thing that makes really salient for me is, it makes it seem so much more unlikely that there isn't intelligent life anywhere.
- SSSara Seager
I agree. Biologists don't like this, but yes, the numbers just seem to tell you there has to be intelligent life somewhere out there.
- AGAdam Grant
Why don't biologists like that?
- SSSara Seager
Because we don't understand how life originated on Earth, and so we cannot assume that it originates elsewhere until we understand how it happens here.
- AGAdam Grant
Okay. But [laughs] the, the, the question of, of mechanism seems like a really different one than the question of probabilities, doesn't it?
- SSSara Seager
Well, aren't they related? I mean, you have to know how something occurs in order to assess the probability of it occurring again.
- AGAdam Grant
Fair. But, you know, I, I guess thinking about this as a social scientist, [laughs] uh, even, even not understanding the mechanisms, I think, [laughs] what are the odds that, you know, we're talking one in a trillion times how many galaxies?
- SSSara Seager
Well, I'm with you, I'm with you. And just to be honest, one thing that a lot of us want is to find a sign of life, one more sign of life with an independent genesis. And then I do think we can d- you know, we can all agree that if it formed twice independently, the chance then is just so believable that it's happening elsewhere.
- AGAdam Grant
So [laughs] it's hard for me to even imagine, like, h- how would it be the case that it's just here, that it's just Earth?
- 7:48 – 9:10
Why intelligent life nearby is unlikely in our lifetime
- SSSara Seager
Sure. Let's for now agree that there has to be intelligent life somewhere out there with trillions of possibilities in our galaxy alone. What we're more focused on in a practical fashion is the nearby stars. So it's not trillions of them, or rather hundreds of billions of stars. It's maybe, like, the nearest hundred stars or the nearest few thousand stars that we can legitimately, legitimately search, like, with our generation's capabilities.
- AGAdam Grant
Yep. And then, okay, the probability starts to feel a little smaller at that point.
- SSSara Seager
It does, unfortunately.
- AGAdam Grant
What do you think is the probability that we find intelligent life in, in our lifetime?
- SSSara Seager
It's... Well, okay, I hate to break it to you [laughs] of just on my personal opinion alone, it's pretty low.
- AGAdam Grant
I figured as much.
- SSSara Seager
I, I might even put it zero- at zero for now.
- AGAdam Grant
Wow. And why? Is it just too far?
- SSSara Seager
Well, a lot has to happen for intelligent life to evolve, right? I may be getting outside of my depth here, but I think back to, like, the dinosaurs, right? The dinosaurs dominated. You know, I can't imagine us humans, like, even exist- coexisting with dinosaurs. If the dinosaurs had survived, there wouldn't be room for any more, you know, for us humans or some other life-form to be intelligent there. So it's not just that we have to have planets nearby that have the right conditions for life, but life has to be able to evolve and get to a place where, um, there's room for intelligent life to, to also evolve and to be willing to communicate with us. There's just a lot that has to go right.
- 9:10 – 10:08
What discovery would change: humanity’s place in the cosmic story
- AGAdam Grant
So what would it mean if there is life on other planets? Like, how do, how do you think about our world changing if we do discover it?
- SSSara Seager
Well, I think that really depends. I think on a daily basis it's not gonna change our life, right? But I definitely think it changes our view of, like, our place in the cosmos. You know, for a long time, for centuries, um, millennia, people thought that Earth was literally the center of the universe. We thought everything revolved around us. And later on in the Copernican Revolution, people recognized or f- acknowledged or found evidence that we're not the center, but Earth revolves around our sun, and other planets revolve around our sun, and therefore our sun is the center. And later on we realized our sun is just but one of countless stars orbiting the center of our galaxy, and now our galaxy is just one of, you know, so many galaxies. So it kind of carries us forward in this cosmic story of what is our place? How do we fit in?
- AGAdam Grant
Okay. So timeline-wise, how long do you think it might take to discover life if it's out there?
- 10:08 – 11:33
Where we might find life first: solar system targets and exoplanet biosignatures
- SSSara Seager
Let us just start with simple bacteria, like, not even complex life, just the simplest life-form we can think about. Maybe even simplest, simpler than our human, than our bacteria here on Earth. Let's start with that. That we hope to have evidence for. Maybe not robust, solid findings, but kind of suggestions. We really hope to accomplish that in our lifetime, starting with our solar system, the subsurface of Mars. One of my favorites is the clouds of Venus. Little primitive microbes just floating around. Perhaps subsurface of one of Jupiter's or Saturn's icy moons. Like, Enceladus is one of the favorite targets. It's got plumes of water kind of bursting out. And a lot of these places we've seen organic molecules or have hints from models that organic molecules could be there. So I think that is a big, big deal to find signs of primitive life. In terms of exoplanets, we now can study their atmospheres, and we're looking there for signs of life. Like, a few steps removed from actually, you know, collecting samples and looking for bacteria, but gases that don't belong. Like, here on Earth we have oxygen. That fills our atmosphere to 20% by volume. But without life, without plants and photosynthetic bacteria, we'd have no oxygen 'cause it's so reactive. So we're looking for gases that don't belong. So I know I'm, like, really excited, and maybe you and others are not as excited about just finding these tentative hints, but that's, that's where we're at.
- 11:33 – 14:01
Reframing the Fermi paradox: distance, detection limits, and the ‘ants’ analogy
- AGAdam Grant
No, I th- I think it's tremendously exciting to find even the most basic signs of life anywhere outside of Earth. Uh, I mean, that, that to me would be a [laughs] could be an Earth-shattering, no pun intended, discovery. And I mean, there are so many questions this raises for me. One, one is the way you do your job, it almost eliminates the Fermi paradox for me.
- SSSara Seager
In what way?
- AGAdam Grant
I think... Well, I, I mean, as, as I understand it, and please correct my lay understanding, but [laughs] I, uh, when I first read about the f- the paradox, it was the idea that, you know, on the one hand it seems highly likely that there should be intelligent life out there, and on the other hand, like, if, if it were the case, we would already know about it, and we don't, and therefore What's going on? And from your point of view, it sounds like there are two simple explanations of this. One is that our tools are too primitive to detect it or to reach it, and the second is that it might just be way too far away.
- SSSara Seager
That is definitely one of my thoughts on it as well. But the other side of the Fermi paradox is if there is a s- like, a superintelligence out there, why aren't they coming here? You know, that's kind of what it is. It's kind of less about us and what we can do and more about what this other supposedly more advanced civilization or civilizations would've done.
- AGAdam Grant
But they could also be too far, right? And they could be super intelligent but still not be able to reach us, right?
- SSSara Seager
I think so. Or they may decide it's not worth the energy to reach us.
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs]
- SSSara Seager
I mean, it literally takes a lot of energy. Or my favorite theory actually is that they could maybe do all the above, but they just don't bother. It's like the ants. I mean, unless you live in, like, a concrete block apartment or house, the ants seem to come every year. Like, in the spring, you know, they come, they do reconnaissance. You get a, a few ants, and if they hit upon a piece of, like, cat food or something, right? Then you get a whole stream of them. You know, they have their own kind of intelligence. They, you know, they went back and told the team, "Come this way." But would you talk to those ants? Like, would you-
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs]
- SSSara Seager
... say, "Hey, I'm Adam. I've got this podcast"?
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs]
- SSSara Seager
I mean-
- AGAdam Grant
No
- SSSara Seager
... I... Well, I actually like to think we're the ants. We are the ants to the superintelligent beings out there, and, like, why would they come here and talk to us?
- AGAdam Grant
Wow. Okay, I wouldn't go and talk to them, but as we do whenever we discover a new animal species, I would wanna study them. Are you suggesting we're not even interesting [laughs] enough to be studied, or-
- SSSara Seager
Okay, yeah
- AGAdam Grant
... are they studying us from a distance? How do you think about that?
- SSSara Seager
Maybe, maybe they're studying us, just like if we study the ants. Do they know we're studying them?
- AGAdam Grant
All right. So it might be happening, and we're just, we're in the dark about it.
- SSSara Seager
Maybe.
- 14:01 – 16:14
Should we send messages? Active debate, and why oxygen already ‘advertises’ Earth
- AGAdam Grant
Okay, as far as we're concerned, I've, I've been so curious for a while about if aliens are out there, is it a good idea to search for them? Tell me if, if you read this article. There was a, a "Times" piece, uh, before the pandemic by Steven Johnson called "Greetings E.T.: Please Don't Murder Us." And [laughs] Steven, you know, at least raised the question of should we be galactic introverts rather than galactic extroverts? And it really pushed me to rethink the whole idea of, [laughs] of doing the outreach and making contact because, uh, it, I, I, I think the, you know, the best case scenario is really great, but the worst case scenario is existential risk. And it w- when it comes to other forms of existential risk, we proceed extremely cautiously. And so I, I'm so curious as an expert on this, like, where do you come down? Should we be searching? Should we not be searching? Um, should we be... If we find it, should we try to make contact?
- SSSara Seager
Well, I can say that in the astronomy community, people do vigorously debate sending a message. Once in a while, some people get together, and they're like, "Hey, we're gonna send the signal," and then other people damp them down and like, "No, don't send the signal." So that debate is actually an active one.
- AGAdam Grant
And where do you come down on it?
- SSSara Seager
I don't think it matters.
- AGAdam Grant
Even if they're like us? I mean, let me phrase that a little differently. I think if they're vastly more intelligent than we are, of course they'll find us.
- SSSara Seager
Yeah.
- AGAdam Grant
But if they have similar levels of intelligence, they might have an equally difficult time finding us, right?
- SSSara Seager
That's right. If they-
- AGAdam Grant
It could be millennia-
- SSSara Seager
Yeah, that's right. Mm-hmm
- AGAdam Grant
... or, or longer before they detect us.
- SSSara Seager
Right. If they're like us now, they can't find us 'cause we cannot find another Earth twin right now. So at this moment, they wouldn't be able to find us, but, you know, they could just be a few hundred years ahead of us, which is nothing in cosmic time.
- AGAdam Grant
Right.
- SSSara Seager
And yeah, they would... They could, they could find us. I mean, the first thing they'll do is they'll see oxygen, and they'll know it's a highly reactive gas and shouldn't be there. And so the first thing they'll do is suspect there's some kind of life here, not necessarily intelligent life, but they'll be... There's something re-engineering the atmosphere, something that's constantly pumping out oxygen 'cause it's so reactive it shouldn't last.
- AGAdam Grant
So if we find them before they find us, do you think we should make first contact or no?
- SSSara Seager
I do. I do. But I honestly will go back to what I said over and over again, that if they have the ability to come to us, then they already know we're here.
- 16:14 – 17:46
Imagination vs. scientific practice: what alien life might look like and why it’s secondary
- AGAdam Grant
Did you read "Project Hail Mary"?
- SSSara Seager
I did, yes. I did read it.
- AGAdam Grant
So Andy Weir was on the, the show, and we had such an interesting conversation about his creative process around, you know, imagining, like, what, what would a different origin of life look like, and what kind of planet w- would they come from? I'm sure you daydream a lot about these kinds of questions. If you imagine us finding life out there, like, where do you, where do you envision it? What does it look like? [laughs] What, what are your images?
- SSSara Seager
Well, believe it or not, we don't do that [laughs] very often unless we're asked, like, by science fiction people. So we do sometimes think about it, but not in that sense.
- AGAdam Grant
Mm-hmm.
- SSSara Seager
So for example, we have thought about this. I mean, one kind of one is that if a planet has, like, a higher surface gravity than Earth, you know, we expect animals, like, close to the ground with, like, big, huge legs so they can, they can defy gravity, right? It's like the opposite of when you're in the swimming pool, and you... how you can lift something really heavy in the pool 'cause the water buoyantly is, like, helping you hold it up. The opposite of that, a high-gravity planet where you can barely drag yourself around. Or we've imagined planets with, like... Very unscientific. This is just, like, dreaming, but some of these planets, um, have massive atmospheres, and they're probably really dark at the surface, extremely dark and gloomy. Maybe there's birds with giant wings that fly high up, where the wings are like plant leaves. You know, they have photosynthesis ability, like, to get energy from their sun, like-
- AGAdam Grant
Wow
- SSSara Seager
... while they're flying. We can easily put a bunch of things together, but it's never really in the context... It's never in the context of, like, actual scientific work right now.
- 17:46 – 21:13
Why space science matters on Earth: STEM pipeline, spillovers, and exploration as a human good
- AGAdam Grant
So I guess one thing this, this makes me wonder about, what do you, like, what do you make of the fact that so many people are opposed to the idea of doing the kind of work you do because we have too many problems here on Earth?
- SSSara Seager
Right, right. I do get that question a lot.
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs] Do tell.
- SSSara Seager
I do. Well, the best answer I can give you is to solve, like, practical problems on Earth, we need a lot of people trained in technological sciences. Like in physics and engineering and math and other topics. And one of the big things we do in astronomy is we communicate to the public the wonders of science. So I want you to think about young kids and even my origin story where I talked about the night sky. Like small kids don't know about the large defense agencies or they don't know that, you know, someone had to invent insulin or GLP-1 or lasers, right? We don't hear about those. Like telling a little kid, "Wow, like lasers are part of our everyday world and you know they were just invented from pure physics." Or, "Hey," tell a teenager, "You know how you're glued to your GPS 'cause you've gotta get somewhere, and that just came from this kind of long, convoluted just exploring rockets, rockets and people wanted to get beyond Earth's gravity and orbit Earth." So one of the main things is just to attract more people to science. We need astronomy to con- you know, show people how great it is. That's number one, like en- encouraging people to do-- go into STEM fields. Um, the second one is that it's really hard to explain to people that pure science of any kind is needed and may at the outset seem wasteful, but those things I've just mentioned, GPS and medicines and lasers and so many things, you have to do so much extra science, you know, just to get to a discovery. You can't pre-plan what it is you want to do. And I do have an analogy that is a bit of a sad analogy, but it's also a legit one. I got to go to the UK with when my kids were younger on a soccer tour. They call it football, of course. And honestly, there's so many players that go through the talent pipeline just for the very few that make it to the top teams. And so all of science is like that. You have a ton of stuff happening and you'll be like, "Why do I support astronomy? Why do I support this? Why do I support that?" That's why. In astronomy, we take credit for some medical imaging 'cause we had to translate our data to images. And so we need to get that message out of why we spend so much on science because without doing that, we can't find the discoveries that were not conceivable before.
- AGAdam Grant
Yeah. I, I think that that tracks with what I know about the psychology of creativity. One of the, the most successful models in the field is basically a model of blind variation and selective retention, and it says, uh, this is Dean Simonton's work, um, probably most seminally, but it basically what it says is, [chuckles] just like evolution, um, idea generation requires a tremendous amount of variety and then, you know, a lot of like, there's gonna be a lot of noise, and the challenge is to find the signal and then hone in on it. And I think, you know, maybe underscoring that, I've read some evidence that approximately half of all patents are either accidental or spontaneous discoveries.
- SSSara Seager
Interesting.
- AGAdam Grant
You know-
- SSSara Seager
Yeah
- AGAdam Grant
... not driven by a planned search of any kind.
- SSSara Seager
Right. Right.
- AGAdam Grant
And so I think [chuckles] you're, I think you're spot on.
- SSSara Seager
Great. Well, I'm glad that one resonated with you. But one more we should ask ourselves, like as a society, should we have exploration? Should we have great art and great music? And parts of science are like that.
- AGAdam Grant
Yeah. They're, they're um, they're, they're kind of like creative adventures just for the sake of them.
- SSSara Seager
That's right.
- 21:13 – 27:17
Lightning round and closing reflections: inner voice, Venus microbes, humility in the cosmos
- AGAdam Grant
Okay. I wanna go to a lightning round. I've got a few rapid-fire questions for you. One is, what is the worst career advice you've ever gotten?
- SSSara Seager
Don't go into astrophysics. You'll never make it.
- AGAdam Grant
[chuckles] Glad you ignored that one. Best advice as somebody who's not been afraid to take scientific risks?
- SSSara Seager
I could give maybe more than one answer, but one idea is hone your inner voice. Like unpack your successes and then try to develop that inner voice. Like, you know, if you're walking in the back alley and there's like a shady character, you feel the-- you're, you're worried and you go the other way. But we also have that same in a positive way for science and for everything we do, right? Like you may meet someone and be like, "Hey, I w- wow, I need to get to know this person better," or, you know, you may have the opposite vibe. But we have that in science also, so honing that, that's the best advice I haven't gotten but that I can give.
- AGAdam Grant
Yep. Okay, following that, do you have a hypothesis, a hunch, or an opinion that's controversial in your field?
- SSSara Seager
Yes. Right now it's that there could be life, microbial life on Venus in the clouds of Venus that are not made of friendly water, but are made of concentrated sulfuric acid that kills all of our life instantly.
- AGAdam Grant
Wow. Oh, if, if you turn out to be right on that one, that, that will be a revolution. Do you have a favorite space film?
- SSSara Seager
I can't say I have a single space film, but I love all the films about meeting intelligent aliens. One is called "The Arrival" because it's really a film that doesn't assume these aliens are little green humanoids. Instead, they're like a weird kind of life that we can't really communicate with. We can't actually, and so I really like that depiction of it. I love the time travel mov- um, actually, I love every movie that has to do with time travel. I know time travel is not possible, but I just love that idea of like getting put in the future or the past. Um, some of the other movies, I love "Interstellar," what a great movie, because as much info as we can get about exoplanets now or in the future, we'll never know the little details. And in "Interstellar," you know, they found planets, they may be places for us to go in the future, but until they actually go there, they don't know if we humans, we're so fragile, could survive on these other worlds.
- AGAdam Grant
Ugh, great choices. If you got to host a dinner party for anyone in history, alive or dead, who would you invite?
- SSSara Seager
You know, I'm not the one who admires people or has heroes. It's just like who I am as a person. But I would definitely invite dead family members. I would definitely wanna bring them all back and have a moment.
- AGAdam Grant
That makes sense. I have to wonder, though, like you wouldn't wanna sit at dinner with Copernicus and Galileo?
- SSSara Seager
[chuckles] Honestly, probably not. Like it might be fun.
- AGAdam Grant
Really?
- SSSara Seager
I don't know. I mean, there's something about having people in the past or people who are no longer alive. There's something about just preserving your memory and what you know about them. Like what if you invited Kepler or Copernicus and they were a total A-S-S? Like how would you feel? Wouldn't that just like shatter your, your dream of these people? But-
- AGAdam Grant
No.
- SSSara Seager
No?
- AGAdam Grant
No. I have modest expectations-
- SSSara Seager
Oh, okay. All right
- AGAdam Grant
... of their personality and character. I, I just think it would be so interesting to bring, you know, somebody who was responsible for one revolution into a time where there have been many others and see how they react and like w- or, you know, you take like I don't know. Like, I, I would love to have a dinner with Einstein reacting to the gravitational waves discovery.
- SSSara Seager
I see.
- AGAdam Grant
Okay.
- SSSara Seager
I see. Yeah.
- AGAdam Grant
Now that that hypothesis is supported, what does he envision next?
- SSSara Seager
Right. Or maybe you'd like to bring someone from the future who would tell us our fate or if we're going to become those maybe cyborg or maybe not. Maybe we'll be all taken over by AI.
- AGAdam Grant
Okay, I give you the mic now. I think it's time. Do you have a question for me?
- SSSara Seager
Well, I do have a question for you. I'd like to know what motivates you.
- AGAdam Grant
What motivates me? I, I think there are a lot of things. Uh, and it's a weird question to answer as somebody who studies [laughs] motivation. Like, ah, I should probably have a, a well-thought-out answer to this. But what, what seems to motivate me most consistently is, one, a desire to help other people, and two, a, a love of learning. Uh, I think those are, those are kind of the, the twin joys of, of the work that I do. I, I remember, um ... I, I don't, I don't know if I've ever felt as well-captured by a quote as when I stumbled across E.B. White, uh, saying, "I wake up in the morning torn between a desire to enjoy the world and a desire to improve the world, and this makes it very difficult to plan the day." I feel that conflict a lot, but I, I think I've mostly been able to resolve it by, uh, trying to, you know, to improve people's lives in a very small way, um, through, you know, both discovering and communicating knowledge, um, about what makes humans tick. I just find that endlessly fascinating.
- SSSara Seager
I like it. Thanks for sharing that.
- AGAdam Grant
Wow. Thank you for asking. I think what motivates me is understanding what motivates other people and then [laughs] trying to help motivate them. That would've been a more succinct answer, wouldn't it? Okay, so before we wrap, I just wanna ask you, you have said frequently that we shouldn't be so arrogant as to assume that we are alone in the universe. Why? Why is that arrogant?
- SSSara Seager
It's just self-centered, really, like, thinking that we're the only thing that could be out there.
Episode duration: 27:27
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