Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Missions to Mars? Driverless cars? AI chatbots? Feels like we're already living in the future. Well, Robinhood is built for the future of trading. Robinhood's intuitive design makes trading seamless, so you can spot opportunities and take control of your trades. You can now even trade your stocks and crypto all in one place. Sign up for a Robinhood account today.
Investing is risky. Robinhood Financial LLC member SIPC is a registered broker-dealer. Cryptocurrency services are offered through an account with Robinhood Crypto LLC, NMLS ID 1702840. Robinhood Crypto is licensed to engage in virtual currency business activity by the New York State Department of Financial Services.
Certified financial planners are ethical, educated, and experienced professionals committed to acting in your best interest. That's why when it comes to your finances, it's gotta be a CFP. CFP professionals can offer advice on a wide range of issues, including reviewing your investment portfolio's allocation, handling an inheritance, rolling over a company retirement plan, building education savings, dealing with consumer debt, and
reviewing your options for life insurance, and more. Find your CFP professional today at letsmakeaplan.org. Hello, everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us. I'm Kyle Rizdahl. Tuesday, May 13th. Today, we are taking a break from all the...
happening down here on Earth. And we're talking about space, one of the things that Kimberly and I love to talk about. We're going to talk about an exoplanet that is 124 light years away. It's called K2-18b.
Right. And it was recently in the headlines because researchers claim to find possible signs of life in the planet's atmosphere. But there are some other scientists who are a little bit more skeptical. So here to make us smart about K2-18b and where the search for extraterrestrial life goes from here is Dr. Michaela Musilova. She is an astrobiologist and analog astronomer.
astronaut. She's worked at NASA and observatories all over the world. Welcome to the show, Dr. Musilova. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. Hi, everyone. Hi. So first off, what does an analog astronaut do?
An analog astronaut is someone who lives and works under conditions of being on the moon or Mars to prepare humans to actually be able to go on such long-term missions one day. And so in reality, what that means is we get, quote unquote, locked up in these small stations in very remote areas, usually around the planet, for sometimes weeks or over a year.
And we live inside these small stations where we have limited access to water, food and other things necessary for survival. And to go outside, we can only go while wearing a spacesuit and only with the permission of something like a mission control center. So similar to NASA Houston, you might know from movies and books.
And yeah, there's a number of these facilities that exist in different parts of the world. So for example, on volcanoes or in deserts in the Arctic and so on. And they have been used for the last couple of decades to test both people and technologies and prepare us as best possible to be able to go to the moon and to Mars one day. And I myself have been the commander of over 30 such simulated missions recently.
We should do like a whole show on that because that's just wild. Yes, absolutely. But since we can't do a whole show on that right now, tell us about K2-18b. How did we find it? Why is it interesting? What do you all think about this? Yes, so K2-18b is an exoplanet. It's a planet that orbits another star beyond our solar system.
And as you mentioned, it's about 120 light years away. And what's interesting about it is that it's in an area that scientists call a habitable zone. So it's an area
certain distance from the star the planet orbits where water could be in liquid form on the surface of the planet. And so we're calling it habitable because life as we know it, we think depends on water. At least again, life as we know it, there could be very different types of life forms elsewhere in the universe, but we don't know how to study those just yet. So we're looking for places that are similar to Earth and that's why water is very important.
And so for water to be liquid, the planet needs to not be too far away from its stars so that the water doesn't freeze and become ice. But of course, if it's also too close, then the water will evaporate and there isn't much that life could use to survive on that planet. And so K2-18b...
is considered to be in the so-called habitable zone of its parent star. And recently, through different analyses with instruments and telescopes, they've been able to detect different molecules in its atmosphere
And some researchers claim that these molecules could be so-called biosignatures. So these are different substances or even textures that could indicate that something was created by life rather than just being created, you know, through geology or chemistry or some non-biological means.
And this is what made the headlines recently. Oh, there are these so-called biosignatures in the atmosphere of this exoplanet. It means that there could likely be life there, but it's not just that simple. What kind of life would we be talking about in this case?
Most likely, if these are indeed signatures of life on this planet, we'd be talking about something very simple like algae, marine algae that would live in something like an ocean. And that's because the researchers who made this discovery
They think that the planet is actually covered by oceans and has a hydrogen-rich atmosphere, and that's why they call these types of planets hyseans. It's a combination of hydrogen and ocean. However...
Other researchers think that the planet is actually too close to its nearby star, and so actually it wouldn't be possible for the planet to have oceans because they would just get too hot, the water would evaporate, and there'd be nothing for these marine algae to live in. So that's part of the controversy related to this discovery.
Marine algae is a long way from, well, I'm going to sound jaded here. Shocking. It's a long way from like life on other planets as other people think about it. But, but, I mean, this is going to sound stupid, but I mean, this would be unbelievable. It would be truly like revolutionary first time, right? So what do we do with this information now?
So at this point, we're still very much in the, you know, is it actually a detection of life or is it potentially just some noise in the data? So we're in that kind of stage as scientists. And it's sad because as an astrobiologist myself, it seems that any time we get close to potentially finding some alien life, there tend to be a thousand detectives.
different reasons why people think it's not life. And so you have to fight extremely hard to prove that you found something and essentially every single time gets dismissed. And it's understandable because...
If we really prove that there is alien life out there, imagine the impact it will have on society. And that impact might not be very positive because of religious beliefs and various other things that we'll have to take into consideration. So there's a reason why scientists are very cautious when it comes to these situations. And the only time we'll really be able to be sure that this is, yes, 100% alien life is if we can have...
the data confirmed ideally by different teams. So it's not just the same team of researchers that's fighting hard to prove, you know, that they found what they found, but ideally you have different teams that are going to check their results.
And they're also going to use different instruments, ideally through different telescopes. And that way, you'll be sure that the data isn't biased, that you really went out of your way to prove this in different types of ways. You get a robust data set so that when you do analyses, everything will be statistically significant. So basically, we're trying to avoid
It just being by chance that, you know, the telescope, maybe there was some noise in the data, didn't detect something properly. And, oh, it looks like some kind of, you know, molecule made biologically. But the reality is it's just, you know, a technical error in the telescope or something like that. Speaking of telescopes, this was found thanks to James Webb Space Telescope, right? How has that telescope in particular changed sort of the search for life in our galaxy? Yeah.
It's been very useful because until recently, you know, we've used different types of telescopes to first just try and find these exoplanets, so these extrasolar planets. You know, we had the Kepler telescope, and nowadays we have tests and other ones that are helping us find the exoplanets in the first place and confirm that they truly are planets orbiting other stars and not, again, some mistakes in the data.
But with the James Webb telescope, we're actually able to look in more detail at the atmospheres. And this is a huge step forward for us astrobiologists because, sure, it's great that there are a bunch of other planets in the universe, but that doesn't mean that there's life on all these planets. But if we can study these planets in more detail and look at their atmosphere, is there oxygen in the atmosphere, that would be great.
Probably, you know, very strong evidence that there is some kind of life form similar to us or what we have on this planet elsewhere if we find something like oxygen. But there are also other molecules that for now we know only can form under biological circumstances. So created by some kind of living organism similar to what we have on Earth.
So if thanks to this telescope we could analyze other atmospheres and find these strong bits of biosignatures elsewhere, that would be a huge step forward in our search for alien life. And this is essentially thanks to this telescope because it has such capabilities to help us study these planets in more detail, which we weren't really able to do or not in this much detail before.
Can we get back to the data collection on this thing? Because obviously what we're doing is we're telescopes and spectroscopy and whatever it is that you all scientists do. But the thing that always gets me about these big space distances is literally the distance. So the light photons that you are seeing when you look through your telescope at this thing or whatever is 124 years old already by the time it gets to your eyeballs, right? So how hard does that make the science for you? Does that make any sense?
Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, at the moment, we're basically analyzing what we get. But yes, in theory, if we did detect...
something that was like strong evidence okay this is some kind of alien life then we would think about it going okay well this was alien life you know 120 years ago right right right uh you know is it still there and whatever so i think until it becomes relevant the fact that it is of a certain age doesn't matter that much unless it's like you know four billion years old and then it you know takes us back into the beginning of time of our um solar system and and so on
So I would say that time issue isn't so much the problem. It's more the distance between
creates issues when the telescopes don't have sensitive enough instruments. Because you're trying to detect something very far away, and that is basically our main issue. Sometimes we're struggling to know if we're actually seeing signs of some interesting molecules, or is it just noise in the data because the instrument just isn't good enough? Even though it's amazing, but it's still not good enough for those huge distances. Right.
Well, and I know we were trying to avoid talking politics today, but this kind of gets at the political situation because for better instruments, more research, better ability to figure stuff out like this, it takes funding, resources, money. And President Trump has proposed some pretty dramatic funding cuts to NASA. How would that impact?
impact research on K2-18b, other planets, and generally the search for life elsewhere? We're all pretty worried that it might have a pretty big impact because the cuts are mostly related to the science part of the programs. And so that affects telescopes, future telescopes that are being built, what the telescopes that exist, what kind of science they might be used for going forward.
And already nowadays, it's hard to get a decent amount of time on a telescope to be able to get significant data. And so now that time might be restricted because suddenly many more scientists are going to want to be using a limited amount of telescopes and therefore their data sets won't be able to be as robust. But also of these other missions and future telescopes that
a lot of scientists were looking forward to, now it's a question mark. Are they actually going to finish building them and actually send them to space? How is that going to be affected? And some argue that, oh, well, a lot of these things are already underway. You wouldn't just scratch that. But then if you look at something like the Mars sample return missions, it's a very important mission that has been talked about for a long time to actually finally get samples from Mars, bring them to Earth,
which would greatly help us in understanding whether life ever evolved and could potentially still be present on Mars. But even such an important mission looks like it might be scrapped, which would have a really terrible effect on astrobiology. So, you know, if something like that could be scrapped, then who knows what will happen to missions related to looking at exoplanets, which are even further away and even more speculative in the sense of, you know, trying to detect signs of alien life.
Politics seeps into everything, doesn't it? Thank you so much, Dr. Michaela Musilova, who is an astrobiologist and analog astronaut, a new term I learned today. Thank you for making us smart. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure. Bye-bye. You got to wonder if this, I mean, that thing she just said about limited time on telescopes, right? That's the thing that got me because now the politics of this is going to shut down the awesome science.
And that's what I go to so often for the make me smile. I need it. Oh, boy. All right. Listeners, compatriots, fellow wannabe analog astronauts, time for you to weigh in. What do you think of K2-18B? Do you think there's someone somewhere out there? If not, wouldn't it just be a waste of space?
Or are we just shouting into the void? Leave us a voicemail at 508-827-6278, also known as 508-UBSmart. We will be right back. In honor of Military Appreciation Month, Verizon thought of a lot of different ways we could show our appreciation, like rolling out the red carpet, giving you your own personal marching band, or throwing a bumping shindig.
At Verizon, we're doing all that in the form of special military offers. That's why this month only, we're giving military and veteran families a $200 Verizon gift card and a phone on us with a select trade-in and a new line on select unlimited plans. Think of it as our way of flying a squadron of jets overhead while launching fireworks.
Now that's what we call a celebration. Because we're proud to serve you. Visit your local Verizon store to learn more. $200 Verizon gift card requires smartphone purchase $799.99 or more with new line on eligible plan. Gift card sent within eight weeks after receipt of claim. Phone offer requires $799.99 purchase with new smartphone line on unlimited ultimate or postpaid unlimited plus. Minimum plan $80 a month with auto pay plus taxes and fees for 36 months. Less $800 trade-in or promo credit applied over 36 months. 0% APR. Trade-in must be from Apple, Google, or Samsung. Trade-in and additional terms apply.
The Jeep brand has always stood for American freedom. And now we're standing with you with Employee Pricing Plus. Hurry into your Jeep brand dealer for details today and join the family. Jeep, there's only one. Offer valid on select 2024 and 2025 Jeep brand vehicles for non-FCA employees and retirees. $200 admin fee applies. Not all buyers will qualify. Restrictions apply. Does not apply to leases. Ends June 2nd, 2025. Jeep is a registered trademark of FCA US LLC.
Member Week is here at Lowe's. Don't miss your chance to get up to 40% off hundreds of items like paint, stain, tools, flooring, and more. Shop our exclusive deals happening in-store and online from May 8th through May 14th. Not a member? Join myLowe's Pro Rewards for free today and get ready to save more. Lowe's. We help. You save. Loyalty programs subject to terms and conditions. Details at Lowes.com slash terms. Subject to change.
Back we are, news we shall do. Adam's coming. Kimberly, you get to go first. I am still digging into the details as they're coming out of this big reconciliation package, which I would encourage everybody to do as well, because there's a lot of stuff in there that's going to affect the way that we live day to day. And, you know, we've got more details on the no taxes on tip.
which tips, which they're actually trying to do no taxes on overtime, which they're actually trying to do. A lot of these policies, very expensive. I also thought it was interesting. The idea of no taxes on car loan interest, a bonus deduction for seniors. But the thing that stopped me dead in my tracks as I was kind of going through some, some of the big takeaways from this reconciliation package is the
Oh, man. Right? So you get $1,000 just for having a baby, $4,000.
for that baby's future, which I was like, isn't that just the baby bonds idea that Cory Booker and Daryl Hamilton have been floating for years and years and years? And yes, that's exactly what it is. It's this baby bond bonds idea that a lot of Democrats have been pushing. And now it's being rebranded as a MAGA account, which I thought was
Just interesting. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right? Yeah. I mean, I doubt Cory Booker is going to, you know, not want it in the legislation because it's called something different. I mean, I imagine there's plenty of other reasons that Cory Booker might vote against the bill. But anyway, just there in the show notes, we've got two links, Washington Post summary and a Wall Street Journal summary. Both of them are really good at laying out some of the big top lines.
Another story that caught my eye, not for the headline, but for sort of the substory, is the fact that on Thursday, there's supposed to be oral arguments at the Supreme Court on over the birthright citizenship fight where Trump signed an.
President Trump signed an executive order pretty much as soon as he came into the White House trying to end birthright citizenship for people. I guess first generation birthright citizenship since most of us got our citizenship from being born here. But whatever. But what's more interesting, and I'm going to read here from SCOTUS blog.
Though the dispute comes to the justices through challenges to Trump's effort to end birthright citizenship, the primary issue before the court on Thursday is whether lower court judges can issue what are known as universal injunctions to block an order nationwide. With a universal injunction, a federal judge, or several in this case, can bar the government from enforcing an executive order, or in another case, a law or policy, anywhere in the
country. The Trump administration, which has been blocked by many such injunctions in recent months, argues that practice is unconstitutional. This is a massive deal.
Because this has been the primary way that any group, individual states have tried to push back against Trump administration executive orders, Biden administration executive order, any administration's executive order. They go to the federal courts in their region and they say, we think this is unconstitutional. And that
And regional court can say, we think there's reason enough that this is unconstitutional or that it may be unconstitutional. And so we're going to put a pause on it until we can sort it out. And that affects everybody nationwide. And this is why we get a lot of court shopping, which we've talked about on the show before.
Where different groups will try to bring their cases to certain federal judges in certain districts because they think the judge will go their way and it'll affect the whole country. So what the court decides in this case doesn't just matter for the huge issue that is birthright citizenship, but it matters for everything.
Yeah. So this is the same process, procedure by which just, for instance, in one of the really big name cases, a federal district court judge in Texas named Matthew Kosmarek was able to ban nationwide the use of Mifepristone.
So what's going to happen in this case, actually, is they're going to decide the district court injunction issue before they decide the merits of the case on the birthright citizen service. So what could happen is that they could, if they wanted to, the justices, six of them who shall remain nameless.
could restrict this case to just the seven actual named plaintiffs in the case and then let the Trump administration end birthright citizenship for everybody else until they hear the case on the merits. So that's part of why this gets really complicated really quickly.
Anyway, so mine is a far lighter note. And also in keeping with the theme of the first half of the program today, a piece in the New York Times today, photography section by an astronaut named Don Pettit. He is 70 years old, the oldest active astronaut in the in the space corps, if you will, the astronaut corps, who has just come back. And they published a whole mess of his really cool pictures from the International Space Station. And we will put on the show page and you should have a look and just zen out for a little bit because it's cool.
Yeah. I love space photos. Although now I'm like all paranoid the ones I see online that are really pretty. I'm like, is this real or is it AI? Yeah, you know.
Anyway, that's it for the news. Let's do the mailbag. Hi, Kimber Kai or Kyber Lee. This is Bernadette from Atlanta, Georgia. Dan from Boulder, Colorado. I have a bunch of questions. I love the show and y'all are awesome and nerd it out. We were talking about mini retirements a couple of weeks ago. Younger-ish workers taking breaks from their careers. Carl in Palo Alto, California sent us this one about the time he took a mini retirement of sorts. In my case, my wife-to-be was working, making good money while I was in the service. We
We married when I got out, and neither of us was ready to settle down and work. We sold my car and bought a VW camper van for pickup at the factory in Germany. We traveled, ate, and slept in that van all over Europe and North Africa for the next nine months. On the way home from Morocco, we missed the ferry to Greece and decided that it was time to start heading home. We certainly grew immensely and matured as persons from the experience. Amen, Carl. That's cool.
that's very cool oh man they must have a million stories from that adventure that's so cool
Okay, one more. I was talking about how reading sci-fi and fantasy helps me reset and escape a little bit on the show yesterday, and we got this message about it. This is Mary from Hendersonville, North Carolina. I had a professor in grad school call the nonfiction books broccoli books. Good for your brain. You learn something, but then you also got to balance it out with some chocolate pie books, which are your favorites, your fiction, something to really just reset. I like that.
Yeah. And, you know, especially in a town like D.C., when you ask people like what they're reading, people can get like all tense because you want to say like the very smart, sophisticated thing or the something related to politics or whatever. But really, everybody's just like reading smut or whatever. And, you know, sometimes people will be like, I can't talk about what I'm reading right now. Yeah.
And I was literally at a restaurant the other day and like this exact happened. I said, there is no shame if you're actually reading books. It's a win, especially in this world. But hey, we actually want to know from you all what your favorite chocolate pie book is or series or what you're reading. And what do you read in particular when you need a reset or just an escape? Yeah.
My sister and I read during kind of sort of the depths of the pandemic as well, this one series called The Discovery of Witches. And it was one of the reasons that we decided to go to Venice on that trip, because a lot of the scenes in this series take place in Venice. And so we were sort of living out some of the moments from that book series while we were there. And it was a lot of fun. Yeah.
That's cool. That's cool. I, you know, I go science fiction-ish, like I read The Martian and stuff like that, you know? Mm-hmm. All right. Before we go, we will, as we always do, leave you with this week's answer to the Make Me Smart question, what is something you thought you knew but later found out you were wrong about? In honor of Mother's Day this past weekend, this week's answer comes to us from Jasmine Chan, author of the novel The School for Good Mothers.
When it comes to parenting, the question of something I thought I knew but later found out I was wrong about is hard to answer because the list is so very long. But I will say that I thought I knew that elementary school years would be challenging, but no one really told me they would also be really cool and fun.
Everyone focuses so much on the baby and toddler years, but no parent is really awake then. The part where you're reading, thinking, learning new human wants to talk to you about how the world works is pretty incredible. I love hearing every single thing my daughter has to say. And it turns out that eight year olds ask the very best questions. I like that. I like that. I'll go with that.
I have to say some of the most entertaining things I have ever heard in my life have come from my nieces and nephews in that time zone. Totally. What's something you thought you knew but later found out you were wrong about? You can email us at makemesmartatmarketplace.org or leave us a message at 508-UBSMART.
Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergseeker. Our intern is Zoha Malik. Jake Cherry is on the other side of the soundproof glass engineering the program today. Becca Weinman is going to mix it down later on. Ben Talladay and Daniel Ramirez composed our theme music. Our senior producer is Marissa Cabrera. Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcast. Francesca Levy is the executive director of digital. And Marketplace's vice president and general manager is Neil Scarborough. Or so he says.
I'm just waiting. That's all I'm saying. I'm just waiting.
Can we invest our way out of the climate crisis? Five years ago, it seemed like Wall Street was working on it until a backlash upended everything. So there's a lot of alignment between the dark money right and the oil industry on this effort. I'm Amy Scott, host of How We Survive, a podcast from Marketplace. In this season, we investigate the rise, fall, and reincarnation of climate-conscious investing.
Listen to How We Survive wherever you get your podcasts.