"the following is a conversation with clara souza silva a quantum master chemist at harvard specializing in spectroscopy of gases that serve as possible signs of life on other planets most especially t..."

"is also exciting we humans and natural explorers for most our history we explored the surface of the earth and the contents of our minds but now with space-faring vessels we have a chance to explore l..."

"and uh that it may be a signature of extraterrestrial life big maybe big maybe there was some pushback of course from the scientific community that followed friendly loving pushback then in january an..."

"i think it is a distinction and myself and other co-authors were talking about this it's a distinction between hypotheses generation and hypothesis testing now hypothesis testing is something that i t..."

"the nutrients is still a huge jump and so so that would be the the title for the civilization if it is a living and thriving and venus is venusians until we know what they call themselves and that tha..."

"i mean in the best possible way i've been working on phosphine for over a decade before it was cool way before it was cool um before anyone could spell it or heard of it and at the time people either ..."

"like it'd be nice to kind of build up intuition of how little data we have based on which i mean if you look at like i've just been reading a lot about gravitational waves and it's kind of incredible ..."

"really in the cards right now i mean how do you there's all kinds of noise first of all yes there's uh all kinds of other signal so how do you separate all of that out to pull out just this particular..."

"how does that make you feel how should it make us feel should we be scared should we be excited let's say it's not intelligent life let's say it's microbial life it's uh is it a threat to us are we a ..."

"world and so i don't want our first interaction with alien life to be massacre so i definitely wouldn't want to go near out of a let's say galactic responsibility galactic ethics and i often think of ..."

"it's certainly a problem with mars because we visited the that that if there is life on mars or like remains of life on ours it's always going to be a question of like well maybe we planted it there l..."

"it's actually quite a simple molecule in many ways and you know it's the most popular elements in the universe carbon hydrogen nitrogen oxygen phosphorus sulfur when you add hydrogen to them it makes ..."

"making it so absolutely mysterious absolutely deadly smells horrifically when it's made it produces other kind of diphosphines and it's been reported as smelling like garlicky fishy death uh once some..."

"phosphene is really understudied um no one had really heard of it until nowish what you were presenting is the fact that life produces phosphate not the the process by which it produces fasting is the..."

"yeah yeah when when i first started my phd i knew i wanted to learn about molecular spectra and how to simulate it i thought it was really outrage outrageous that we as a species couldn't detect molec..."

"would be welcomed by everything that would live without oxygen on earth seemed so cool and but ultimately the project the first is born of the idea that you want to find that molecular fingerprint of ..."

"fingerprint what does it look like you've kind of mentioned the wave but what are we what are we supposed to think about what are the tools what are the uncertainties all those kinds of things so the ..."

"how cool is that that's incredible so you can have this fingerprint within the space of colors and there's a lot of molecules and i mean i would i wonder that's a question of like how much overlap the..."

"no and the place is nasty you know it's not it's not going to be easy to build something that can do the task reliably and can be trusted the measurements can be trusted and then passed that message o..."

"okay so now recently venus is all exciting about phosphine and everything is there is there other stuff maybe before we were looking at venus or now looking out into other solar systems is there other..."

"they're about the right distance from their host star but that's really all we know near future telescopes will tell us much more but for now we're just guessing so you said near future so there's hop..."

"burdens so it's going to do it's good see you are a poet yeah i love it this is very eloquent i love you're speaking to the audience which i appreciate uh so so yes it's a giant engineering project an..."

"this machine so then i had to go well that that's not going to no one's going to dedicate all of jwst to look for my molecule that no one cared about so we're very much at that edge but there'll be ma..."

"astrochemist hi i'm clara i'm a quantum astrochemist how we should have started this conversation can you describe the three components of that quantum astro and chemist and how they interplay togethe..."

"each of whom describes a single vibrational behavior of a molecule so i think phosphine has 17.5 million possible states it can exist in and transitions can occur between pairs of these states and the..."

"so there's some probability assigned to each color then exactly and that probability determines how intense that transition will be how strong and so you run this kind of simulation for a particular s..."

"having fun okay but you uh you write that there are about 16 000 molecules we care about when looking for a new earth or when we try to detect alien biosignatures if we want to detect any molecules fr..."

"party how do you choose other friends to come to the party that are interesting to study as we solve one puzzle at a time through the space of 16 000. so we've already started out of those 16 000 we u..."

"in the spectrum of light they would leave a a mark i can't spend the next 62 000 years doing this work um and i don't want to even if you know somehow i was able that that's not that that wouldn't fee..."

"created rascal rapid approximate spectral calculations for all um and what i do is i use organic chemistry and quantum chemistry and kind of cheat at them both i just try to figure out what is the fas..."

"different that distinguish them from one another but they have that that feature in common we call these functional groups and so most of that work ended up being abandoned because now we have mass sp..."

"enough to analyze the atmospheres the the telescope generated images of other planets close right now it is so complete so it has all of these molecules that it can tell you say you look at an alien a..."

"lot of work so this is really interesting the like the role of computing in this whole picture you mentioned code so like you as a quantum astro chemist there is some role of for programming in your l..."

"and so collecting huge amounts of data about the actual gases uh so you see you so you you are up for doing that kind of thing too so actually like doing the full end to end thing which is like having..."

"yeah when there's a bunch of things that can poison you a bunch of things that could explode and they're gaseous and they're often maybe they might not even have a smell or they might not be visible i..."

"connected it's like it's it's sparse somehow yes you get island sometimes you get a molecule can only jump from one set of states to another and it's trapped now in this network it can never go to ano..."

"atmosphere right exactly how cool would that be if we could you know scan an alien planet and go oh this is what the clouds are made of this is what's in the surface these are the molecules that are m..."

"you know you can go very quiet you can throw out some weird molecule to confuse us further but we can still see all your other metabolites it's hard to fake uh is there so you kind of mentioned like w..."

"but outside that context you could still produce oxygen without life but phosphine although better in the sense of it is much harder to make it has lower false positives still has some so i'm actually..."

"when the the living organisms have first discovered a way to destroy the entire the uh the entire colony can um the uh increase in sightings not have to do with the fact that people now have more came..."

"uh being open to the possibility of is uh visiting earth is a good idea not everything though i'm not so open-minded to the flat earth uh hypothesis is there's a growing number of people uh believing ..."

"like if if because our understanding of what is life and i just talked to sarah walker who's uh you know sarah yeah we talked for three hours about the question what is life there's a good person to t..."

"way our human mind works and the fact that this thing is a quantum process please don't i i understand this it's not woo i'm not i could but it very well could be there could be something at the at th..."

"like there's a certain that would never happen part of the reason that i feel so confident that aliens have not visited because they would have had to visit just to have a look remotely you know from ..."

"been visited because we are too pathetic to hold that well let me hold that truth if we're making it like a 10 bet there's a possibility here that the main say there exists one alien other intelligent..."

"not completely blind but there's a colleague here at harvard uh uh cameron vaffa he's a theoretical physicist i don't know if you know him i've only joined harvard about six months ago okay it's time ..."

"versus the colonization like the the conquering and all those kinds of things that's you know beneath them that's benito that i mean that said do you think there's um any hopeful search for life throu..."

"us so i'm not that worried about intelligent life but i think it is unlikely even on earth is unlikely out of what is it five billion species across the history of the earth yes there's been one an in..."

"same time that we're looking is deeply implausible but life i think is inevitable and if it is inevitable it is common so i think there will be life everywhere in the galaxy now how common that life i..."

"is where we create yeah we create things that are yes there's all the ugliness in the world there's all the on the on the biological and the chemical level there's the pollution but we create beauty i..."

"second thing is i tend to believe we can engineer consciousness but at the at the basic level understand the source of consciousness because if consciousness is unique to humans and if we can engineer..."

"like we're more conscious than giraffes for example in spiders yes i won't deny that i i there is something special about humans i you know they're my favorite species they are they are you know some ..."

"intelligent life is nowhere long enough to uh to communicate with each other to form little clusters of um civilizations that expand beyond the solar system and so on man maybe becoming a multi-planet..."

"existence that is only i think the drive of our most primitive instincts to go and take to go and plant a flag somewhere we love planting a flag somewhere and maybe we could overcome that minor drive ..."

"was younger and i was told what would happen ultimately to the earth as the sun expands towards a red giant and you know mercury would just like fall in and then you know venus fall in and the sun doe..."

"there was a notion of the white dwarf cemetery which is this idea that when stars become white dwarfs that death is so horrible that planets potentially habitable planets that could have been habitabl..."

"and so that was my idea during that time that thesis was trying to explore this notion of life coming back and this idea of the universe doesn't care if you're here or not and it will go about its bus..."

"not taking her personally the son doesn't owe us anything he's not a bad parent it's not a parent at all yeah i was looking at the work of freeman dyson and seeing how it how this universe eventually ..."

"use of programming in your own life well i'm a terrible programmer a lot of scientists their programming is bad because we never learned formal programming we learned science physics chemistry and the..."

"is in fortran and so if you want to use other people's code who have now retired fortran will be nice and then i used idl to visualize so that uh simulation and body simulation those all fortran and i..."

"strike i should also comment as a public service announcement or a request if there's any world-class 4chan or cobalt programmers out there i'm looking for them i want to talk to you because that will..."

"and i i do think that's frustrating and so i think my advice to any young people who want to get into astronomy or astrobiology or quantum chemistry is that i certainly find it much easier to teach th..."

"very basic element great code i guess i was also kind of criticizing the software engineering process versus like which is a good thing to do is code that's readable almost like without documentation ..."

"do you want to try the question again proudly okay i i have a really good question to ask you okay don't oversell it i've got an okay question to ask you ever yeah what uh what do you is the most beau..."

"powerful to be able to predict the heavens something so much larger than myself that felt really powerful it was almost a selfish desire and that's what i wanted there was some control to being able t..."

"themselves are despite being probabilistic and that makes me feel really pleased to be in science but in a really humbling way it's no longer this thirst for power and i i feel less special the more w..."

"did you take away i absolutely have time for books and movies i try as best i can to not work very hard i mostly fail i should point out but i think i'm a better scientist when i don't work evenings a..."

"a mentor a teacher a head of a research group do research yourself you have to do service all the kinds of stuff you're doing now with education and um interviews yeah yeah so as a a public science li..."

"but to be productive is not clear to me what you have to do you have to not be miserable otherwise i find it extremely hard when i'm having conflicts with um collaborators for example kind of very har..."

"science than if you would try to work with three geniuses who are just hell to be around yeah i mean there's parallel things like that i'm very fortunate now um i was very fortunate at mit to have fri..."

"and i think it is something you can really improve on i've become a better collaborator as the years have gone on i don't have some innate collaborative skills i think their skills i've developed and ..."

"your signs will be and uh since i'm russian just murder anybody who who doesn't fall into that beautiful collaborative relationship we were talking about books books yes is there books why was i talki..."

"let me ask one other ridiculous question we talked about the death and life cycle that is ever present in the universe until it's not until it's super massive and little black holes too at the end of ..."

"because once there is no meaning i don't have to find it [Laughter] uh yeah once there's no meaning it's a kind of freedom in a way you sound a bit like um [Music] i'm happy about it this isn't a depr..."

"we please we created it we've created a need for it and so that's our problem to solve i don't apply it beyond us i think we as humans have a lot of responsibilities but they're moral responsibilities..."