From WXXI news.

This is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Our connection this hour was made in the Chilean Andes with a celebration video from PBS Nova shows scientists whistling, dancing, clapping.

For some, the celebration was one that was about two decades in the making.

The team was reacting to the first images captured by the Vera Rubin Observatory, home to the world's largest digital camera ever built for astronomy.

Every few nights over the next decade, the camera will capture images from the entire visible sky.

In the Nova video, one scientist can be heard cheering greatest images in the history of astronomy.

As reported by Eye's Veronica Volk, the series of images will create the most detailed time lapse record of the cosmos ever captured.

We're talking about 60,000,000 billion bytes of imagery.

They will create a movie of sorts, which will feature exploding stars, colliding galaxies, and, scientists hope, solve some of the greatest mysteries of the universe, like those related to dark matter and dark energy.

Those who saw the images describe them as awe inspiring.

Some of the first people to see them were community members in our own backyard.

Last month, the Stress and Berg Planetarium hosted a first look watch party, one of several hundred across the country.

Rochester was a fitting location for one of those parties, since one of the mirrors in the room, an observatory was developed in Rochester.

This hour, we're talking with the experts, including those who worked on the telescope, about the galaxies, Nebula, nebulas, Nebula, nebulas, and asteroids they saw and what it all means for the future of science research and our understanding of the universe.

And I want to welcome our guests now.

Welcome to Jim Bater, director of the Strasbourg Planetarium.

Thank you for being with us.

Thank you for having me on.

Next to Jim is Doctor Segev Ben-Zvi, and doctor Ben-Zvi is an associate professor of physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Rochester.

Welcome.

Thanks for being here.

Hello.

Thank you.

Across from Doctor Ben's TV is Doctor Becky Borelli.

And Becky is the principal fellow in Space Superiority and Imaging systems at L3.

Harris.

Welcome to you.

Thank you.

And next to Doctor Becky Borelli is Doctor Fred Mole.

Camp red is a research scientist at the Rubin Observatory.

Welcome.

Thank you for being with us as well.

Here.

Thank you.

So, Jim, let me start with you.

With these watch parties.

What was it like at the first look watch party there?

It was exciting for us, I think, in a lot of ways.

It was also, it was a first in the planetarium.

We did.

It was a huge international dome cast.

So, a lot of planetariums got together and had a base of operations so that we could have a fully immersive event in the theater.

And, and I think that we were really fortunate that, Rochester, such a hub, we were able to bring in some wonderful experts and people who have insider views.

So we could do a great Q&A to talk about, really what's happening with the big release.

Yeah.

I mean, it's such a great place.

And Jim is right.

This is really is, a great opportunity this hour for us with the guests here, but also in this community to have access to these experts in in this moment.

And so, you know, you're looking there at twinkling galaxies and these pink nebulas and, you know, is it hitting you, what you're looking at, how is it sinking in with you when you're seeing this stuff?

I mean, definitely when it, when it hits that the views of what you're seeing were spectacular.

But what was wild about these images is that you could just keep zooming in and keep zooming in.

And this is why I think the planetarium was such a great platform for this, because, well, you could look at these images on your screen.

You've needed some kind of an app which which Rubin had had released to view them.

But in the planetarium you could show them really and a lot closer to their full scale.

Yeah.

I mean, it's amazing is like understating it because, Becky, I've got a friend who has a droid, like a Samsung phone and I have an iPhone, and if he tries to send me a video, it's just a blurry mess.

We for days, we cannot figure out how to solve this problem.

And yet you guys did something that allows you to keep zooming and keep zooming and keep zooming in deep space.

So first of all, I feel like my friend should be able to solve this droid problem and actually figure out how to send me a video.

But second of all, what in the world have you done here?

I mean, this is really remarkable how did L3 Harris get involved?

We were contracted to do the secondary mirror, the what's called the M2.

In the system, it's about a 3.5m sized optics, so roughly 12ft in diameter.

And as most secondary mirrors, it's convex, which means instead of a bowl shape, it's a dome.

It's like a hill.

And so our job was to grind and polish that mirror to its final figure.

And, and keep in mind when I say that, if we had an error on the order of a micron or less.

So take the diameter of the human hair, divide it a thousand times.

It had to be better than that.

Then they would not be able to get the images that they're getting.

So our job, in manufacturing these optics is to make sure that they have a pristine surface and are going to be able to perform, at the the level they're supposed to.

So can I ask you a dumb question?

Yeah.

Of course.

Now you're somebody smart.

Years ago said to me, there's no dumb questions, just dumb people ask questions.

You know, I have a question that I forgive me here, but what you're describing, the level of precision that is required.

Where was the construction of the mirror happening?

It was happening here in Rochester.

How do you transport it then?

So even just moving it around our shop, we basically have to shut the shop down whenever it's moving through the shop.

Because if you imagine something that's, you know, bigger than, you know, a story of a building, right, is 12ft in diameter.

Everybody has to get out of the way.

And it's it's glass.

It's it's fragile.

It'll shatter, it'll break.

So there's a team of people that are in charge of lifting it off of whatever equipment it's on, putting it on its transport device.

And then there's another team that standing around making sure no one's coming through.

No one's in the way.

It's it's a huge effort just to move these things.

Typically when we need to move them between buildings, it's done at night.

So there's not a lot of traffic.

But we also had a very large steel box that this thing was, was moved around in.

I mean, to me, truly unbelievable.

Did you know before the first images came back, did you have a sense that it was going to work the way you want it to?

We have high confidence.

We we we've been doing this a long time, but there is always a little bit of a moment of sort of holding your breath because with any of these systems, whether they're ground based systems like Rubin or space based systems like James Webb or Nancy Grace Roman, you there's a little bit of holding your breath until you actually see an image and say, okay, yeah, we did our job.

Everything looks great.

So we had high confidence as high as we can, but but when those images come back, there's a sense of of relief and immense pride that we managed to accomplish that.

And before the program began, doctor Ben-Zvi was just talking about some of what we might be able to start accomplishing or understand better about the universe.

Literally gravitation, expansion of the universe.

Take me through some of the kinds of things that you are excited to see explored.

You should be careful asking that question, because I could give an hourly.

Yeah.

Let me give me the short version, the source, and then we'll go deeper.

Yeah.

The short version is, both of those things are to some extent century old problems.

I mean, that's the cutting edge of physics, but, we've known about dark matter about 100 years.

What?

And to understand dark matter, it really doesn't require much more than just high school physics.

Right?

Newton's laws of gravitation.

The idea is, starting about 100 years ago, people looked at clusters of galaxies, studied how they moved.

And you can use Newton's laws to take that motion and infer how much mass is there.

And if you do a careful census, you count up how many galaxies there are in a cluster of galaxies, and you ask, how much mass is in each one of those galaxy.

If you can estimate the number of stars in them, you get a small fraction of mass from just those galaxies compared to what you infer from Newton's laws.

So it's a very, huge underestimate.

What we can see is not all that's there.

And because we can't see it there, it was called dark matter.

That was actually, a coinage by Fritz Zwicky, a Swiss astronomer in the 1930s.

So that dark matter influence is the motion of mass throughout the universe.

But we can't observe it.

We can only observe its indirect effects.

And so part of what Rubin is designed to do is, by making this amazing catalog, this amazing atlas of of hundreds of millions of objects, billions of objects, really, we can really start to quantify the effect of this dark matter on the objects that we can see, the luminous matter, the galaxies.

So make sure I'm understanding dark matter.

Well, if I'm in a room with a closed door and next door, I hear music of many different instruments flowing out of the room.

And it's music maybe I've never heard before, but it's clear that it's different tones and different sounds.

And then finally I can get into the room, but it's very dark and the first thing I find is a piano, and I hear what the piano can do, and then I hear the sound.

The rest of the room is making it.

I say, okay, the piano is part of this, but this is not the totality of what's creating the sound.

Just because I can't see the rest of the instruments doesn't mean that they're not there.

That's right.

I haven't found them yet.

But I know that something is going on here.

Is that roughly what you're talking about?

Dark matter?

Yeah, that's a reasonable metaphor.

What dark matter does it it it gravitates.

It attracts other mass, just like planets that we see in the solar system, just like other stars.

You know, we're attracted to the sun.

We're obviously on Earth, we're attracted to it.

And galaxies attract each other and they cause each other to move.

And so we can see that influence.

But if you ask the question, is all the mass that's out there, just the galaxies, we cannot explain their motion.

We need there to be other mass in order to be consistent with the laws of gravitation, as we understand it.

Now, there's another solution to this problem, of course, which is you throw out the laws of gravitation.

Maybe you say Newton Newton's laws are wrong.

Einstein's general relativity is wrong, and there are arguments for that.

But, it's not the most plausible, argument, to be perfectly honest.

It's not consistent with a lot of evidence that we have from many, many other sources.

We think that certain laws do travel pretty well.

Yes, exactly.

The law of thermodynamics seems to travel, right?

Absolutely.

So there's a lot that we might still not know.

But do we have any guesses on dark matter?

I mean, how much do we are we getting anywhere close to starting to solve that?

Yes or no?

I think a lot of the progress has been made in the last few decades has been ruling out what dark matter could be, so people have looked at many things like asking, well, is it gas, is it dust?

And the answer is no.

And the reason is because gas and dust can heat up as it moves.

And eventually when something heats up, it glows right in the infrared.

And infrared astronomy has existed since the 1950s.

And so we would see that, in other wavelengths, we wouldn't see it with our eyes, but we would see it with special instruments.

Then people ask, maybe it's things like, objects are called brown dwarfs, essentially.

Imagine like rogue planets, things like the size of Jupiter that are almost massive enough to be stars.

But do not have nuclear ignition inside of them.

Is the universe filled with those kind of objects?

And starting in the 1990s, people did a lot of censuses looking for evidence of that.

And those do exist.

But it's not nearly enough to describe the dark matter.

Okay.

Okay.

So one of the one on this before I turn to Doctor mole camp here.

So why does Rubin give us a better shot at understanding this?

What is going to improve our chances of understanding?

I mean, it's largely the statistics and a view of the universe that's much wider and much deeper than anything we've had before.

So by, looking at much, much fainter objects, we can study the motions of the universe in ways that would otherwise be biased, because we can only see the brightest objects and, every time you go deeper, you're looking at fainter and fainter objects.

You learn more.

And that's without getting too, too technical.

That's essentially the gist of it.

So, doctor Mole camp, you've heard your colleagues in different fields.

You're describing maybe the significance here when you are talking to the lay public and they say like, well, what is the big A big deal about Rubin?

You know, we've had different devices before that help us see into the into the, into the universe.

What's different this time?

What do you say?

I guess the two big buzzwords are big and fast.

For something this big to be able to to move as quickly as it does.

Like, you have to imagine that this telescope weighs about half 1 million pounds.

Okay?

And that's if you include the if the the optics, the camera, the mount, all that.

And in just a matter of seconds, they can go from pointing in one place of the sky to the other.

And it's just going to do that every 30s the entire night.

So the amount of data that we collect is just astounding.

You know, we're going to generate about 10 million alerts per night of transient objects.

So those are going to be things like asteroids, comets, supernova in distant galaxies.

You know, just more data than we can go through.

You know, it's going to take us decades to go through all this.

Right?

It because it's going to keep going over the same areas.

What happens is every time you image the same place in the sky, you know, there's a there's noise in the background.

So you have, you know, kind of like a small signal, the noise.

And then you take another image.

You can basically kind of add those together in a certain way so that your signal increases while your noise stays the same.

And that's what allows you to see, you know, further back in time, allows you to see fainter objects.

And so like, Sagan was saying, so like in terms of like dark matter, for example, what we can do is there's an effect called gravitational lensing.

So what happens is if you have like a cluster of dark matter and light goes, goes through it, it actually acts like a lens and bends the light.

Even the sun does this.

It was one of the first proofs of general relativity was showing that the sun bends light from stars that are nearby.

It.

And so what you can do when you have billions and billions of galaxies now is you can look at the light and you can see how, on average, their shapes are manipulated and bent.

And this is so called weak lensing.

And so by doing that we can actually have a detailed map of dark matter, and then by other measurements that we can make on the galaxies to tell how far away they are.

We can know, you know, kind of like a 3D map of what dark matter looks like.

Maybe it's just because I've been watching Resident Alien.

But I'm curious to know, will we have a better chance to see biosignatures if they exist with this?

So this isn't my field.

I don't, I don't I think you need more, special, specks spectroscopy for that.

And so you can, you could if you're looking at something like that, then we just have like really broad band filters, as opposed to having like really detailed measurements that you could see individual elements.

So yeah, that's a very honest answer.

And I'm amazed at the conversation that we're having here because I maybe I'm tying it into what we're going to talk about next hour, which is trying to understand how do you use tools and technology in a way that supplement the human experience and doesn't foreclose on the need for, human knowledge, human skills, etc.?

And listeners probably know I'm a bit of a I'm a bit of a skeptic about AI, although I am, I would not be surprised to hear our colleagues and maybe Doctor Mole camp.

It.

If you are optimistic that I will at least help with data collection, with sorting information in a way that doesn't, remove the need for the human work that's happening, is AI helping you?

I use it every day.

Every day, every single day.

And not even just with my work.

But.

Yeah, I think if you use it properly, AI helps you, expand your curiosity.

Like, if you're curious about something and you have an idea, you can.

You know, normally we would do, like if we're working on something new, we do something called rubber ducking it.

And so, like, you have an idea and you just tell it to your rubber duck and you don't really get any feedback, but just saying it out loud and being able to kind of get it the words out helps you get an AI, you know, helps clarify the thoughts in your head.

AI is like a rubber duck that also can give you feedback.

And so you can say things that like, I can ask it questions that I'd be way too embarrassed to ask Segev because I would like to think he's judging me.

Right?

Or like, you know, any of my colleagues, but but if I, you know.

But I can ask, can I?

Because I don't have that judgment.

So I can ask it really simple questions.

But then there may be like some small piece that I was missing, so that all of a sudden now my picture becomes so much clearer, and so like all day long, like I use it to if I'm working on an algorithm, if I'm working on, like, some data and I am like, trying to, like, kind of fine tune an idea, I find it invaluable.

And you find it pretty accurate, pretty helpful.

It's it's like talking to a person, right?

Like when you talk to a person you can't trust, everything that they say is going to be 100% right.

You have to use that logical part of your brain that says like, do I trust this?

Let me poke at it a little bit, because sometimes when you do that and then the AI starts to crumble, you're like, okay, like like you've still helped yourself because you're you're getting a better picture in your head.

Now we're getting into a semantic battle, but I, I worry about anthropomorphizing AI and thinking it.

It is like a person or giving it, you know, human sounding names.

And I understand why we do that.

We're going to talk more about that next.

Our next hour is all about AI and our relationships and what boundaries we draw.

And, you know, what we expect of technology in the future for us and for our kids and for their kids.

But, I'm at least heartened to hear that there is a useful application in your field, doctor mole camp, that is assisting you in ways that it might at least make the work more efficient.

Faster.

Yes.

Yeah.

It really, it it.

To me, it takes a lot of the boring work.

Like it's, it's not going to replace, you know, like scientist because it can't do the creative parts.

It can't do the large analysis.

But what it can do is just the boring, mundane things that I hate doing.

It does, and I love it for that.

That is a great way to describe what we should be doing with AI.

It should be doing the boring things, not the creative, important things that I know.

Now my soapbox and this is not a soapbox.

Our we are talking about the remarkable work that's happening at the Vera Rubin Observatory and some of the connections right here in our own community.

And you met you heard earlier this hour, you heard Doctor Becky Borelli, who is principal fellow in space superiority in, and imaging systems at L3.

Harris, talk about this local connection.

And now is the work now that this has been successful is it done for you?

I mean, what else is there going to be fine tuning additional work for you in the future of this?

Our part on a room at it's complete at this point.

Once we delivered the mirror, it was done.

But we continue to work with, you know, the scientific community on other scientific missions.

So we, we work very closely with NASA.

We have multiple missions that we're working with them right now.

But yeah, our part with Ruben is, is completed.

Do you feel that this community should have a little bit of pride given.

Absolutely.

Hometown?

Absolutely.

Not at all.

Not only Pharisee Ruben, but we had a huge part in the James Webb Space Telescope.

We had a huge part, we made the telescope for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is that got her now preparing for launch.

We are partnering with NASA on their laser interferometer.

Interferometer Space Array called Lisa.

And, we also are working very closely with them on their next mission, which is a bit of a worlds our, our connection in Rochester to space science and universe exploration, goes back a long way and we continue to to work with those partners.

MTA is the largest convex mirror ever made, is that correct?

Yes.

Largest convex mirror ever made.

And the is the size of a small car.

And I think if you're watching on our YouTube stream, we've got images up.

I want to make sure that I'm describing.

I've got a couple in front of me here in physical form, and then we've got them on, on YouTube here.

So we're this is going to be like kind of a really bad game show.

But this is an image provided here by Reuben.

It's this is actually 678 separate images taken by the observatory in just over seven hours of observing time and combines and combining image way reveals of faint or invisible details, such as a cloud of gas and dust that comprise.

I think it's the Trifid nebula in the top right and the lagoon Nebula.

These are several thousand light years away from Earth, several thousand light years.

Alpha Centauri is how many light years away?

Like four or 12 or 8 or something.

Roughly four.

Four.

Okay.

These are several thousand light years away, so I'm going to show the room here.

Megan Mac, if you can see there's the one we're looking at here.

We're showing it on YouTube.

So I don't know.

I mean Segev what do you see here?

To be honest, it's, very easy for me to turn off my scientific mind and look at it with my, my artistic mind.

Beautiful colors, you know, intense bursts of of light and dark bands where there's absorption happening.

So both the, you know, the, the, appreciation of just how beautiful the images, how gorgeous the images.

And, you know, by the way, seeing it at the planetarium a few weeks ago and really zooming in and it seemed like there was no bottom to the level of detail was just amazing.

And it really brought out the kind of inner seven year old in me, looking at it then and looking at it now, it's it's incredible to look at, it's, it fills me with wonder, an understanding what some of it is doesn't diminish that at all.

Right?

I think that's great.

And so now go a little more sciency and tell me more when you can set that artistic side.

Right.

Aside and tell me a little bit more about what you're seeing there.

If you're putting your science wonk hat on.

Well, whenever you look at the nebula, you're seeing, an important part of the stellar lifecycle.

You're seeing a kind of stellar graveyard.

But also a stellar nursery, right?

Nebulae are produced when stars reach the end of their lives and explode and their atmospheres are blown outward into space.

But then that material eventually cools, re condenses.

And then as it gets dense enough, it forms the nucleus of new stars.

And so we're we're seeing a nursery essentially stellar nursery.

What are you looking at here Jim.

What do you see.

Oh I see colors I see scale.

So I mean, there's a lot of things that I think the general public, when they see these images they want to ask.

But for me it is just the fact that it is beautiful and it makes you want to know more, makes you want to ask questions.

And in this image, on a small scale, you're showing me a piece of paper.

But, the image itself is enormous.

And if you zoom in to that image, even the areas that feel bland, around the corners and the edges, you see these oranges and and yellows?

These are, these are individual stars and uncountable numbers of them.

So the more you zoom in, you see so many points of light, it is phenomenal.

So it's the scale that that image is so far away, but also what's in it and how much is in it.

And how you can use those images to, to, to get the public interested and excited about astronomy.

Well, the scale part really is interesting.

And so how do you help the lay public, whether they're coming for the first time to the planetarium or if they are getting interested in Reuben, how do you help people understand the scale of the universe as we currently understand it, which is an ongoing process.

But how do you start to even contextualize our existence that that's always such a fun stepping stone, because for me, probably the single most interesting thing about, the sciences or astronomy is scale.

Whether it's the tiny scale and you're talking about nano, or you're talking about the cosmology and, and how big the universe is.

So even even stuff that appears close to us, you know, you would say our closest celestial body and the solar system, the moon is pretty wildly far away.

You see diagrams of the moon pretty close to the Earth.

But in reality, this is 250,000.

You could fit all the planets between the Earth and the moon itself is pretty phenomenally far away.

And that's something that is really close to us at least, is how we would perceive it.

Right in our neighborhood and in the universe.

Yeah, yeah.

And then when you say like, okay, well, let's extend that to the next stars.

You mentioned four light years is, is four is a small number.

But when you start breaking that down into miles, it becomes a nonsense number.

You would call these astronomical numbers probably in today's terms, maybe more economical numbers.

But regardless, huge numbers.

So when you try to break down what it means that a star four light years away, that light you're seeing left the star four years ago that makes all of these, some small time machine and away the distances you're looking.

You're looking back a thousand light years away.

That's a thousand years ago.

A lot of this light is coming to you from which is just really spectacular.

And and finishing that off, I mean, just a little glimpse in scale really gives you that impression.

That turns out there's a lot of space in space.

It's a huge, empty and wildly, almost unimaginable, vast, you know, thing.

I don't know how you would.

How do you describe.

No, I mean, I think I mean, even the the thousand light years helping people understand that what you're seeing is kind of a time capsule and that when that light was emitted, you know, we were not sending texts on iPhones.

Yeah, it was indoor plumbing wasn't really involved.

It was a very different time.

And we're just seeing it now.

And it's really remarkable that that goes so far to I think what's also wild to me is just imagine, you know, and we don't have any evidence that there is life elsewhere in the universe.

But if you could say that there was a wildly futuristic people in the Andromeda Galaxy, and they have this impossible telescope that can somehow resolve the surface of planet Earth, and they did that.

They would be looking at the way the Earth was like 2.5 million years.

That's roughly the distance to the to the Andromeda Galaxy, if I'm not mistaken.

That's that's wild.

So they might be looking at what was happening here two and half million years ago, which is, by the way, not what's happening here now.

And that whether you go either direction that is just is mind boggling.

And, and it gives you so many other questions, which for me is the exciting part.

And these were getting people excited about, just science in general.

I love the idea of thinking about not what we are looking at, but what, what the dudes on Andromeda are looking at.

Because I'm now I'm once again, I'm not saying that people uninterrupted.

I know, I know, know I am.

I can say it.

And I'm trying to remember my science classes in high school, Australopithecus afarensis.

Lucy was how it feels like millions of year.

Million.

It's about right.

It's about over 2 million years.

Okay, so it may be the Australopithecus afarensis, crew that they're looking at going like, okay, you know, that's pretty advanced in the universe.

Like as far as the universe goes, that would be a big deal.

But it turns out that, like, that's just because that's how long the light took.

And, you know, now we're playing Donkey Kong and they're like, wow.

I mean, just the scale.

Amazing.

Here.

Do you, Doug Bradley, do you think about scale?

I mean, like, is that part of how your brain sees it?

And we can show you a separate image on YouTube as well?

I mean, this is also it's got these cool swirls, which I'm not really sure Fred will tell me in a second with there this is the the Virgo cluster.

Yeah.

So what are you seeing here.

It's it's incredible to look at.

We we get really excited when we actually get to see images from the systems that we get to work on.

And one of the things I like to keep in mind is that while there's color in there, a lot of those wavelengths are ones that we can't actually see.

So that color has been added so that we can see it.

So a lot of telescopes work in the infrared.

We can't actually see that.

So artists will shift the color.

So that is something that we can see.

But every single one of those colors is a different wavelength.

And it's carrying information.

And it's giving us some sort of information about what is out there.

If you have something like a spectrometer that that doctor mole camp mentioned earlier, you can actually break down the different wavelengths and you can tell what's in there, element by element, based on what you're seeing.

You can tell how fast things are moving.

You can, figure out, relatively how far away they are.

Are they moving closer to you or are they moving farther away from you?

So not only is it just visually beautiful, but every single color in there is giving you different information about what you're looking at.

Fred what about you.

So what am I missing here in terms of this whole conversation.

Doctor mole camp.

When I look at these here as a layperson, what should I be saying?

Stars and galaxies.

No, that's what it is, I think.

I think here, this this picture of scale.

I think I think this is a really good kind of, you know, topic to expand upon.

Because, like, sometimes in some ways we can picture things that are smaller.

I don't know why, but we can think of like, if I, if I say like an atom, right.

Like that has a certain image in your head of like how small that is.

Right?

And then like the nucleus of the atom, even smaller.

Right.

So we think about like the nucleus of an atom that makes up us and everything around us, we see.

And then if we imagine that that atom is also made up of atoms, right.

And we think about the nucleus of an atom on the nucleus of an atom, like the universe is bigger than that.

Right?

And so, you know, so even those images, what we're seeing here is just a tiny fraction of what's really out there, like the universe is that big.

The the other analogy I like to give.

So when we had the eclipse a few years ago, my son and I made, kind of a scale model of the solar system in our road.

And so we, we set about 200, yards or so, about two football fields from where the sun is to where Neptune is.

Right.

And so when you do that, so if you do it on that scale, okay, the earth is just like a couple feet away, right?

Like most most of the inner planets are just, you know, like they fit in this room.

And then like, you get to that's where Neptune is, the nearest planet.

I mean, the nearest star, Andromeda.

I mean, rather, Alpha Centauri is in Ohio at that scale, which, again, is just kind of mind boggling.

Right?

Absolutely.

I love that.

Your son's a lucky dude.

That's a really fun way to do that.

And, I am curious to know what the swirls are there.

This is really a beautiful image, but what are we seeing with the swirls, doctor?

Okay.

Yeah.

So, so galaxies are normally have, like, kind of a bulge part in the middle.

That's where a lot of the older stars, the blue that you see there, that star forming regions like essentially what you can what you can think about is there's gas that's dispersed throughout the galaxy.

And then as these density waves come through, which is what the spiral arm is, it's kind of pushing stars together.

It's pushing well, it's pushing the gas together.

And as it does that, it will trigger star formation, not in just like one star, but you actually get this entire population of stars are all forming at the same time.

And those are really hot.

You know, you have some really hot, really bright stars.

Those are going to be the bluer stars.

And so that's what kind of dominates the light that you're seeing these images.

Again, I hope your listeners are able to see them on YouTube or look them up and go deeper with them.

It's it really is a remarkable achievement array.

And it's really mind boggling to think of what is still to come from Rubin with the work that they're doing.

And I mean, I'm I'm kind of at a loss for words for it.

But one thing that does come to mind gone back to, you know, because I think Jim said there's definitely people in Andromeda and, no.

Jim Bader, who is the director of the Strasburg Planetarium, did not say that I did.

And I'm thinking about just the scope that and the scale that you've all been talking about.

And, and one of the things that's sort of difficult to even conceive of, I understand there's technology and science that would boggle the minds of the smartest human beings, let alone me.

And and maybe there's energy, capacity elsewhere that we maybe there are, Dyson spheres or Dyson swarms.

Maybe.

Maybe that exists.

And people can really travel among star systems.

Who knows?

But the scale is so hard to conceive of that I can't help but conclude two things.

It's like there's no way that there's not more life out there, just given the the number of opportunities, 10 billion, trillion Earthlike stars that we know of, for starters.

But also, there's no way we're ever going to be able to talk to it.

I mean, it's just so far away.

And even the best tech and energy, it's like how you get in here.

I just it's very hard to conceive of.

But, I don't know.

Segev.

Is that that too pessimistic?

It depends.

I mean, there's, there's a combination of factors that affect whether or not we could communicate with, with other life out there.

Some of the factors that are less related to sociology are actually pretty optimistic.

Right.

So we now know that most stars actually do have planets.

That's that's a result of about a decade of surveys now in astronomy.

And so the numbers are very much in favor of some of those planets hosting life.

How much of that life is intelligent?

How much of it can develop technology to communicate?

Is that done in a way that doesn't, essentially use up their biosphere in a way that makes their habitat toxic to them?

Do they destroy themselves in the process of this?

These are all sociological questions that are much harder to answer.

And since I'm not a sociologist, I won't answer those.

But, I would say the the astronomical part of the question.

The biological part of the question is, is very optimistic.

I'd say there's definitely life out there, almost, almost certainly just playing the numbers.

This huge, huge numbers of planets, huge, huge numbers of stars.

But but technological, civilizational life.

And because I mean, again, that that's where the Great Filter comes in.

What is going to prevent something at the cellular level, which would be an amazing discovery on its own from becoming.

I love that we think we're intelligent.

Like I'm sure there's like species out there like, oh, that's so cute.

But civilizational, technological.

I mean, do you think that that is definitely the case?

I would never use a word like, definitely.

Do you think it is very likely.

I think I think it's very plausible.

Is probably the, the most, strong word I would use.

Okay.

All right.

Doctor.

Mole camp.

Plausible?

Yeah.

Yeah, I think so.

I think, I think even if you think about it from like, a physics standpoint, you know, there's kind of this idea of, like, I'll briefly touch on this idea of entropy.

Right?

And one way you can think of entropy is kind of like the amount of information in something where, like the more complicated something is, the lower its entropy.

And in general the universe tends toward higher entropy.

It tends to like, you know, go into disorder, disarray.

But we have pockets of low entropy, right?

We live in one.

We are one.

We are.

You know, you can kind of think of us as low entropy beings, right.

And so I think that there's, you know, because we evolved here, I think there is reason to believe that, you know, there is some other, you know, law that has to do with entropy, where you can get, you know, like a, you know, fixed point where you can start to get a decrease in one area by, you know, raising it everywhere else.

I don't know of anywhere else in the universe that we could go and stand outside under the sky and breathe.

Right.

But I think what I'm hearing you say is we evolved here to do that.

Therefore, it's plausible to assume that those conditions exist elsewhere as well.

Maybe not exactly the same, but in similar kinds of adaptation.

All evolution.

Yeah.

I mean, it could be completely different, right?

But just the idea that it would still like, I think mathematically, like I can imagine it, you know, going toward since finding some way to use the conditions around it to, you know, lower the entropy in those rich regions.

Okay.

I mean, we I think we're alone here, Doctor Bailey.

I don't we're alone.

No way to to put a finer point on it.

Right.

We are we evolved to live in this atmosphere, but there are thousands of species on our planet that involve evolved to live in a very different environment, which is the ocean, right?

We can't go live underwater.

But they evolved to do that.

So what's to say that species on other planets and other environments couldn't evolve to do that?

I mean, that should be a very obvious point.

And yet that's the first time I've ever thought of it that way.

I'm always thinking of like, we can stand outside under a sky.

Not if you're a fish and we can't go into one.

No, that's a really, really important point.

And it just makes it seem, I don't know, Jim.

So you got to come to the conclusion, right?

We can't be alone.

I mean, I think that's I plausible I love that that description probably plausibly we are not alone, just statistically speaking, that amount of stuff that's out there.

But I do love the, the sci fi of imagining what it could look like.

You know, I think not, to give credit to Star Trek, but they they did a pretty wild job describing how other life forms could exist in other wild environments.

Do we do we expect to go to other gas giants and find intelligent jellyfish type life that that have created their own tech, you know, living in the atmospheres of gas, planets?

What what do we find?

I like that that is really exciting and, spectacular.

And it's the the questions of things.

We don't know what to ask yet.

These poor guests did not expect to come out and get quizzed on possibilities of aliens, but that's sort of one of our hobby horses here.

And listeners, if you haven't watched Resident Alien, just a little bit of the plot, this alien species has been coming to Earth for thousands of years kind of monitoring our species, and they've come to the conclusion in 2021 that, we've really just not been useful, that we've become really kind of wasteful and possibly dangerous.

And we're at the point where we should probably be eliminated.

I mean, they tried to help us for a while.

They tried to show us technology in subtle ways and built Stonehenge and did cool things.

But now they're like, not worth it.

So anyway, it's a comedy.

And, it's pretty funny.

I think the writing could be better, but we're trying to be optimistic and what a great conversation.

We've got to get our only break of the hour here.

We'll come back.

We'll answer some listener questions if you have them.

About Reuben, we're talking to Jim Bender, director of the Strasburg Planetarium.

Doctor Segev Ben-Zvi.

Saqib is, associate professor of physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Rochester.

Doctor Becky Borelli is principal fellow in space superiority and imaging systems at L3.

Harris and Doctor Fred Mole Camp is a research scientist at the Rubin Observatory.

Let's take that break.

We'll come back on connections.

Coming up in our second hour, a conversation about the boundaries we draw in our relationships as human beings with AI.

Do you want your kids to have AI friends?

Do you want them replacing human relationships with AI relationships?

Do you want AI romantic relationships?

The future is going to be murky, and we're going to talk about where to draw those boundaries next.

Our.

Support for your public radio station comes from our members and from Bob Johnson, auto Group, proud supporter of connections with Evan Dawson, believing in informed public makes for a stronger community.

Bob Johnson Auto group.com.

All right.

During our brief break, Segev, educated me on something I'd never heard of before.

So make sure the audience understands the galactic quarantine very well.

It's it's a it's much more of a joke than a theory.

It's a theory.

But, you know, this is this is something that's that exists in pop culture where, where we have not seen evidence for extraterrestrial life because we've essentially been examined by an advanced galactic civilization found to be wanting and are now kind of cut out from the rest of galactic society.

So, ostracized, ignored, put in a corner.

Yeah.

Just not worth interacting with.

The cool, actually.

Smart crowd.

Right?

Okay.

Is that plausible to you know, it is not.

I don't think it's really funny, though.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, lately it's really feel like it's more plausible by the year.

But anyway that that's a fun one to to think about here.

Sy writes in His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman envisioned a device his character is used involving quantum entanglement, in which two atoms were entangled so that when you manipulate one, the corresponding one would respond identically wherever it was in the universe.

And they use that to communicate fiction.

But still a wild concept.

Fiction?

Yes.

Also implausible.

No.

Quantum entanglement is a real thing.

What?

Absolutely.

Being tested and used every day and, Yeah, that's absolutely true.

It's, you can entangle two particles and have them interact in what's called nonlocality, where you can affect one part of the system, and then it appears to instantaneously affect the other part.

I mean, how are we doing?

How do we have that on one hand?

And through a rest stop, bathroom's on the other.

What an amazing species we are.

We're an amazing species.

See why that's awesome?

I didn't I had no idea.

Dallas is asking if we plan a trip to Andromeda, and we start flying there.

Could we find out?

Oh, it's gone, I guess.

Yeah.

I mean, like, I guess, I'll start with Jim, because you're the one who really thinks we should go to Andromeda and talk to people there.

But wherever we would go, that's light years away.

It is plausible that something happens in the interim.

Yeah.

And are we are eventually arriving at a very different scenario, right?

Yeah, it's certainly possible.

I think, and I'm curious how other people would agree with that, but probably unlikely that Andromeda is gone, but it certainly could be pretty different.

Or not, what you'd expect in that, that would apply to, you know, anything that you see moving on a day to day basis when you get there, you know, if you see a baseball, it is moving, you get to it.

It might have moved a little bit.

And the same thing would be the case with Andromeda.

Stuff won't be in the same place.

The the galaxy is moving and churning.

That simple idea alone.

But, yeah.

What else would you find when you go out there?

Yeah.

So if we find biosignatures on exoplanets and we go, well, you know, that's 80 light years away or 50 or 40, I mean, it's better if it's closer for a lot of reasons, energy wise, you know, wanting to be alive when you get there, all kinds of things, but also just hoping that it's the, I don't know, unchanged or I don't know how much we can observe, but what do you think there?

Second.

Well, I would say stars are incredibly long lived and, species are incredibly long lived.

So we, we have good reasonably, the human species of order 100,000 years old.

So, you know, we're talking about travel times that are under 100 years.

You know, the odds are in our favor.

Okay.

Things will be okay.

No, I think that that's a pretty good context there anything this side of the table you want to add to the context?

It should should be closer.

Unfortunate.

I don't think there's anybody hanging out in Alpha Centauri, but yeah, I mean, I guess as the as the crank of the, the panel, I'll say that, you know, I think that we also have to be careful when we, we like, imagine, you know, again, 2 million years ago when you had the first, you know, like, human like species, right?

Could they have imagined communicating with, you know, anything outside of eyesight, let alone the other side of the planet, let alone knowing there was another side of the planet?

Right.

And so you just never know what we're going to discover, right?

There's there's, you know, weird things like wormholes and things that are, you know, scientifically possible.

And then that even changes, you know, the travel time, right?

If you can all of a sudden kind of poke a hole in space and go in one place and out the other, then you don't have to traverse the entire distance around.

So and I'm maybe more optimistic about wormholes and other people just because, like people used to think black holes weren't real, they were just this quirk of the mathematics that kind of came out.

But like, it seems like every time there's a quirk in the mathematics, like we find it eventually.

And so who knows, you know, where that could lead quirks in mathematics or like a fiction plots de Zamacona, where it's like, oh, we're just going to go through a wormhole like they did in interstellar, but it turns out maybe like, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Anything you want to add there?

Really?

No, nothing to add.

Okay.

Here's a really good one from Mike.

He wants to know how can the universe be both infinite and expanding?

That's a great question.

Do we think it is?

Anybody want to jump in first on this?

Is it is that what it's.

The universe is expanding.

We know that, we think we know that, right?

Right.

Yep.

So is it.

It can't.

Can it be both infinite?

Expand.

Well, this is this this question goes back, a couple hundred years, actually, where people ask this question, is the universe infinite?

Right.

And, does it not only in, in space but also in time.

Right.

Was there a starting point or not?

And the answer that we have now is that, we do believe it's finite.

We do also believe that it is not infinitely old.

The question about the expansion and what is it expanding into, is maybe a bit of, a difficulty that we just have imagining, what's actually happened because we imagine the universe as some sort of object embedded inside of a larger object.

But that's not necessary, to understand that it's expanding.

So, you know, much in the way that, you know, we we're evolved to understand and think about three spatial dimensions.

And, you know, you can add a fourth to that.

Mathematically, there's nothing wrong with that.

But then try to imagine a four dimensional object as a possible right.

We start to struggle to come up with a good metaphor for what's happening, when we're talking about the expansion of the universe, right.

It's not embedded in some sort of larger structure and filling up a volume that we're not accessing.

But it's a really good question.

Yeah, it's a really, really good question because and it probably does demonstrate the limits of our understanding, Michael.

But I mean, for me, again, I go back to a college professor, a religion class, who talked about, I think, this way back at Ohio University, but he talked about the postulate of first cause.

And he said a lot of, a lot of faith systems start with this idea of trying to go back to everything's got a cause and effect, cause and effect.

How far back can we win this?

But how do you have an effect for without a cause or cause without like it's impossible.

The first cause is kind of the god of the gaps or so.

And I'm not belittling religion whatsoever.

I'm just talking about how limited we are in our thinking and how I think it is very, understandable to start thinking in different ways.

But for some people, more spiritual.

So for some people in different, maybe scientific directions.

But it's a really good question.

Doctor mole camp, anything you want to add on expanding and infinite?

Yeah, I think I think it's hard to say, you know, again, whether or not it's infinite, you know, we we seem to think that it's not, but it's it's kind of like the, the universe, like we used to think of, like the universe as the stage.

And people are the actors.

But it's more like we, you know, everything in the universe is part of it, too.

Like, what makes up the universe is the things inside of it.

And so try to imagine what's outside of it.

This is like at night when I'm having trouble sleeping.

This is the kind of thing that I try to do in picture, and I've, you know, my brain just eventually blows up and I fall asleep.

That's amazing.

The scientists having trouble sleeping.

And it's amazing what you would be thinking about.

Very different than me.

But as we get ready to wrap here, get an email just asking kind of what Jim was saying at the outset of the program or even before the program, which is what we're seeing at Rubin, is going to impact people in everyday life.

And it's easy to kind of convince yourself that it's a conversation for one crowd.

But, let's just kind of close with this.

What are what are some either everyday impacts or big questions that you would, you know, maybe optimistically hope that Rubin, down the line can help answer.

Well, I love that it had, you know, these beautiful images having impact outside of what you would expect.

Obviously, you expect a group of people like us who have physics backgrounds and astronomy backgrounds and engineering backgrounds.

But, what about everyone else?

And a good example for me is, is just the most direct art.

It's a beautiful image.

You look at it, you know, you can certainly think about how many stars and galaxies you see in that image or what's happening in that image.

But, you know, how does it make you feel the colors, you know, all of this has an impact.

And you see this happen from other beautiful images from other observatories.

And I think, I have a really great example from the Hubble Space Telescope, and it's ultra deep field.

So it's a beautiful image that that holds a ton of galaxies and a handful of stars specifically that you can see.

But there was an artist who kind of remade this, I think his name is, Dario Rob Leto, and he it's this piece is actually at the AKG in Buffalo, but, he took stage lights that you'd find on a theater stage and put these on black backdrops.

And if you see that image, almost instantly my brain says, oh, what is this ultra deep field variant of some kind?

But it's art that was inspired by these types of things.

So this impact has a ripple that that affects many other communities that maybe most of us, especially in the sciences, our brain doesn't immediately jump to, how could I create a beautiful piece of art?

From this image, we might think about what it means in that image.

And I love that.

Well said.

Hey, you got about 20s.

What's the big a big question that might get answered thanks to Reuben.

How fast is the universe expanding and what is it going to evolve into?

I hope those are big ones.

Yeah.

Doctor Malcolm?

Yeah.

What?

I guess I kind of agree.

Said, like, how is dark matter distributed in the in the universe?

We we should know that.

What's exciting to you?

What kind of questions are you hoping get answered here?

Honestly, a lot of times I find it interesting to see what we didn't expect to find right?

There's always something that comes up that that surprises all of us in this field.

And the other thing is, with these types of systems, the engineering and the technology that goes into them are typically first of their kind.

And seeing how those things evolved and are used in other ways and in other systems.

Right.

Google Earth satellites, they're taking pictures.

We use them for mapping all the time.

Those technologies existed because of systems that came before them trying to do scientific missions and things like that.

So seeing how the technology evolves, seeing what we find that we don't expect is, is exciting.

You know.

Well said.

As we close here, Jim, how can people engage more with what we've been talking about here at Strasburg?

Well, you can definitely come by almost any of our shows.

We're going to have new images from Reuben as as we get them.

We certainly every day explore images that that have been released.

It's beautiful and they are enormous.

Only experience from places like the planetarium at Great place to do it.

And, anything else?

Other guests for people who want to kind of keep up with the work of Reuben, anything that the public can do to do that.

Yeah, we do have, a website and there is a Sky viewer that you can download on your phone and app, and you can actually look at the images and zoom in and, and play with the data.

There's even citizen science projects, we'll try to see if we can link to that in our show notes.

That's a great idea.

Thank you all.

Congratulations on the incredible success here.

And I want to say on behalf our audience, thanks for being great communicators to the public.

You do such great work.

Thanks to all of you for being here.

I think you have more connections coming up in just a minute.

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