Distant Galaxies, Dark Matter & Our Place in the Cosmos

Dustin Grinnell (00:00:00 --> 00:05:36)
I'm Dustin Grinnell, and this is Curiously.

Ever since I can remember, I've been fascinated by space. When I was a kid, I had a poster of the Eagle Nebula on my bedroom wall. I had a telescope that I used to study the moon, and I was obsessed with books and movies that brought space and astronomy to life. My favorite movie is Contact, based on the novel by the astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan. The main character, played by Jodie Foster, was inspired by the American astronomer Vera Rubin.

My interest in all things space really took off in high school when I was at a friend's house and his dad gave him a stack of books, hoping they might pull him away from video games and spark a new interest. My friend wasn't into them. They were about space, time, cosmology, and Einstein's equations with titles like The Curvature of Spacetime and Simply Einstein. But I was fascinated. These books felt like they might contain answers to the biggest questions about reality and our place in the cosmos.

I asked if I could borrow them, and he said yes. Over the next couple of weeks, I read every single one. That moment marked the beginning of a lifelong interest in space, cosmology, and the origins of life, an interest that stayed with me into adulthood. Even just a couple A couple of years ago, during orientation for a new job, we were asked to bring something meaningful to share. I brought 3 images: a picture of Earth from the moon, a picture of Earth from Mars, and a third image from the edge of our galaxy, taken by the Voyager spacecraft, where Earth appears as a tiny speck obscured by a beam of light.

The director of the organization, a bit dismissively, said, "You really like space." I replied, "I like perspective." Because that's what thinking about our place in the cosmos gives us: perspective. Not just on our own lives and problems, but on our entire species. Carl Sagan reminded us of this over and over again, especially in his iconic Pale Blue Dot speech.

When you see how small and fragile our planet is in the vastness of the universe, it humbles you. It makes you feel small and insignificant, but also paradoxically special. So when I had a trip planned to Baltimore to read a story I'd written for Johns Hopkins' Tendon Magazine, I decided to reach out to Dan Coe at the Space Telescope Science Institute. He seemed open to speaking with journalists, so I figured, why not? And to my surprise and excitement, he said yes.

Not only that, he invited me to see where the magic happens, where teams of scientists and engineers operate the Hubble and James Webb telescopes. What followed was a 2.5-hour conversation that moved from a walk and talk from Mission Control to Dan's office overlooking a bright green forest, and finally to a local pub for lunch and beers. In our wide-ranging conversation, we covered everything from the origins of the universe to the search for life to the role of AI in astronomy and parenting and so much more. I got to ask some of the big questions that have been on my mind for years, not just about space telescopes, but about what life may look like on other planets. Would it be microbes or something we can't even comprehend?

I asked him what dark matter might be, and he shared some of the best current theories. But perhaps the biggest question I asked was about meaning, how to find significance in a universe so vast where we seem so small. Dan's perspective, even if our existence is brief and may not hold intrinsic meaning, He believes, echoing the old phrase, "It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." I love that. Before we get into the episode, I want to say one more thing about Dan. He's, if I can use an old-timey word, a genuinely swell guy.

More specifically, he's kind. And that was a theme throughout our conversation. —from the way scientists collaborate rather than compete, to his hope that as our species matures, we might figure out how to be kinder to one another. He even hopes AI can learn kindness, and that any extraterrestrial species we may one day meet can too. Having worked in corporate environments where I've seen people be downright vicious in their little status games, I found Dan's focus on kindness incredibly refreshing.

And inspiring. In his office, Dan shared a line from the book The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie McKeesy. In the book, the mole asked the boy, what do you want to be when you grow up? The boy replies, kind. That simple exchange reflects a theme in our conversation, that kindness to others and to ourselves is one of the most meaningful things we can strive for.

Dustin Grinnell (00:05:38 --> 00:06:33)
I'm walking on the Johns Hopkins University campus right now, making my way to the Space Telescope Science Institute, where I'm going to meet Dan Coe, an astronomer who studies distant galaxies. And he has been generous enough to spend the morning with me talking about his work, talking about the Hubble Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, both of which are controlled by the Space Institute. So I'm going into the institute now and we're going to tour the facility. We're going to see his workspace, his lab. We're going to see Mission Control where these two space telescopes are controlled from the facility. So without further ado, here we go. So Dan Coe, thank you for joining me on my podcast.

Dan Coe (00:06:33 --> 00:06:37)
Yeah, thanks so much. And thanks for joining me here at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

Dustin Grinnell (00:06:37 --> 00:06:53)
Yeah, I guess maybe to start, we're standing in the cafe of the institute right now. Can you kind of like orient the listener like where we are and what the institute does and who kind of works here? Who's around us? Right.

Dan Coe (00:06:53 --> 00:07:08)
So we're in Baltimore on the Johns Hopkins campus, and we've been here for over 30 years. Close to 40 now, running the Hubble telescope for many years. And I mean, most people even in Baltimore don't realize that we run the Hubble right here in Baltimore.

Dustin Grinnell (00:07:08 --> 00:07:09)
I didn't know. Yeah, right.

Dan Coe (00:07:09 --> 00:07:17)
And now also the James Webb Space Telescope. Mission control is just upstairs. We could head up there in a little bit and you could see that.

Dustin Grinnell (00:07:17 --> 00:07:26)
But this is where it all happens. Amazing. We're in the building where two space telescopes are being controlled. Right, right.

Dan Coe (00:07:26 --> 00:07:26)
Exactly.

Dustin Grinnell (00:07:26 --> 00:07:27)
That's awesome.

Dan Coe (00:07:27 --> 00:07:32)
And some of that is also down at NASA Goddard for Hubble. But for JWST, it's all right upstairs. Okay.

Dustin Grinnell (00:07:32 --> 00:07:36)
Yeah, maybe we can just walk around and we'll see what we see.

Dan Coe (00:07:36 --> 00:07:56)
Yeah, you're lucky there's actually a conference in town. This is our annual spring symposium. So there's hundreds of astronomers from around the world who've come to talk about interstellar things, gas and dust. And so things that we're so specialized. So this is stuff outside of my expertise, but that's what they're all here working on right now.

Dustin Grinnell (00:07:56 --> 00:07:58)
Wow, this happens every spring? Yeah, yeah.

Dan Coe (00:07:58 --> 00:08:02)
And they pick different topics each time and that's what they're doing this time.

Dustin Grinnell (00:08:02 --> 00:08:04)
The topic is interstellar? Right, right.

Dustin Grinnell (00:08:04 --> 00:08:04)
Okay.

Dustin Grinnell (00:08:05 --> 00:08:08)
And yeah, are you presenting or anything?

Dan Coe (00:08:08 --> 00:08:22)
No, so I'm not involved with this one. I've been involved with other ones that, yeah, we've also proposed to, you know, have distant galaxies be one of the topics. And in fact, it was on galaxies more broadly last year. But yeah, so I'm not involved in this one. Cool.

Dustin Grinnell (00:08:22 --> 00:08:24)
And so where are we heading to?

Dan Coe (00:08:24 --> 00:08:56)
So right now we're going up. We started on the second floor, that's where you come in, and this is the third floor, one floor up. And we're heading over to— this is heading over to JWST Mission Control right now, and a lot of these offices were being used during those exciting first few months of launch and commissioning and getting the telescope all ready. And over here is the actual Mission Control. We're not going to go all the way inside, but we're going to look in through the glass. Sure. Sometimes there's meetings in this room, so we'll be a bit quiet, I guess.

Dustin Grinnell (00:08:56 --> 00:08:57)
Okay, of course.

Dan Coe (00:08:58 --> 00:09:03)
In here, through the glass, you can see— Oh, wow.

Dustin Grinnell (00:09:03 --> 00:09:16)
So we're looking at something that looks like what you'd see on Apollo 13 while they're talking. While they're talking to things in space, astronauts and space instruments.

Dan Coe (00:09:16 --> 00:09:46)
So this room was very busy during launch and commissioning, but these days there's just a few people who keep things running. In fact, we only talk to the JWST a few times a day. So yeah, it's a lot more low-key now, but if you saw any of the coverage from TV, this was a really exciting place and time. And yeah, both in that control room and then all around here, they did a lot of the interviews and the broadcast and things.

Dustin Grinnell (00:09:46 --> 00:09:55)
So the JWST is a million miles out in space right now, and it's sitting there in the vacuum of space taking pictures, and we're talking to it.

Dan Coe (00:09:55 --> 00:10:20)
Through this room? Right, so there's the Deep Space Network. There's these 3 large antennas down on Earth that communicate with it, you know, depending on how the Earth's rotated and when it gets to— each one gets to talk to it. And then, yeah, and then that all comes here. And yeah, the instructions of what to observe gets loaded up big chunks at a time, so a lot of time we're not in contact and it can kind of proceed doing its thing up there.

Dustin Grinnell (00:10:20 --> 00:10:31)
Okay, so you kind of— people have of programs that they get approved and like that packet of data is sent up there for it to run automatically on those commands? Exactly.

Dustin Grinnell (00:10:31 --> 00:10:31)
Okay.

Dan Coe (00:10:31 --> 00:10:45)
You know, we have 800 people that work here, including a bunch of people that work to make the schedule to try to fit everything in. It's like this huge puzzle where they try to, you know, pack and make sure it's, you know, really efficient in terms of how it's observing all of our great exciting targets. Wow.

Dustin Grinnell (00:10:45 --> 00:10:49)
And these are astronomers sitting at the tables or are they—

Dan Coe (00:10:49 --> 00:11:07)
Now these will be other people, I forget what they're called, you know, maybe flight engineers or mission schedulers. But yeah, they're, you know, helping to run things. And of course it's all electronic and done remotely these days. And I couldn't tell you what most of those things are on the screen there.

Dustin Grinnell (00:11:09 --> 00:11:09)
Cool.

Dustin Grinnell (00:11:09 --> 00:11:13)
And where's the Hubble mission control? Close by as well?

Dan Coe (00:11:13 --> 00:11:22)
So Hubble, it was here, kind of on and off again, and these days it's down at NASA Goddard. It's been there most of the time. During Hubble's lifetime. So yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (00:11:22 --> 00:11:26)
Cool. Well, thanks for showing me this. Yeah, absolutely. Really cool.

Dustin Grinnell (00:11:26 --> 00:11:26)
Yeah.

Dan Coe (00:11:27 --> 00:11:50)
Sometimes people get selfies by the NASA meatball or the little JVST model we have over here. Yeah, of course. This is a full-scale replica of one of the mirrors. Yeah, I don't know any more details to share with you, but that's to kind of give you an idea. There's 18 of these mirrors, and so altogether it's 20 feet tall. Wow. So think like a 2-story building.

Dustin Grinnell (00:11:51 --> 00:12:03)
And I, you know, in doing some of my reading, you said there was like 20,000 or so people working on this one project. It's really a feat of engineering and coordination. Right.

Dan Coe (00:12:03 --> 00:12:20)
I credit Jane Rigby, who won the National Medal of Freedom for her work on this project. She reminded us how many people have been working on this for decades. To make this incredible discovery machine that we can look back in time billions of years and discover our origins. So yeah, I'm extremely grateful for all that work.

Dustin Grinnell (00:12:20 --> 00:12:35)
And really just the, like, getting it into space was, I remember following that a couple years ago, just, what was there, like 300 or so points of failure? Like any one of those things could have sunk the whole project. Right, yeah.

Dan Coe (00:12:36 --> 00:12:44)
Failure was not an option for any one of those, and we were all, you know, on the edge of our seat, and you know, it all worked, and It's working even better than we dreamed.

Dustin Grinnell (00:12:44 --> 00:12:49)
It's so exciting. Yeah, yeah. And we'll have 15 years with it? Is that—

Dan Coe (00:12:50 --> 00:12:55)
Yeah, fingers crossed. It could go for 20, 30. I mean, you know, the sky's the limit.

Dustin Grinnell (00:12:55 --> 00:13:11)
You never know with these things. I remember the Mars rover. It was supposed to get like, what was it, like some months or something? And then it had 15. It was Curiosity, I think, or Opportunity. It was only supposed to be up there like a few months and it's up there for years and years.

Dan Coe (00:13:11 --> 00:13:42)
I guess they always design these things to make sure they have some criteria that they have to last a certain number of months, but they always hope they'll go longer. And yeah, we got a perfect launch from ESA and the Ariane 5 rocket, and so that conserved fuel to the point where, yeah, we were hoping for— I think the requirement was 5 years, and then we were hoping for maybe 10, but now people are talking about 20 or more, sort of like the Hubble Space Telescope is now 35 years old and still going strong. Amazing.

Dustin Grinnell (00:13:43 --> 00:13:46)
And I'm sure we have 15, 20, 30 years of work for it to do. Oh yeah.

Dan Coe (00:13:46 --> 00:13:51)
We have 40 projects. Yeah, every year we probably have about 5 years' worth to do, so much.

Dustin Grinnell (00:13:51 --> 00:13:59)
I'm curious about just the curation process, like what projects get picked and why, and how does that process work? Yeah.

Dan Coe (00:13:59 --> 00:14:01)
And we could wander a little bit into that? Yeah, absolutely.

Dustin Grinnell (00:14:01 --> 00:14:02)
Yeah, sure.

Dan Coe (00:14:02 --> 00:14:31)
So all of that happens here at the Space Telescope Science Institute. There's— people submit their proposals, and it's the most in-demand telescope. There's— it was over— well over 2,000 proposals, and those all get sent here, and then we bring in a bunch of other astronomers from around the world to debate over them and rank them, and so they, you know, they pick the best ones, and it's a hard process. I mean, I think it's like 10% of the proposals get accepted. Sure.

Dustin Grinnell (00:14:32 --> 00:14:43)
And they're chosen— like, the ones that are chosen are chosen for what reason, would you say? The most— the biggest questions, the most leading-edge questions?

Dan Coe (00:14:43 --> 00:15:39)
Yeah, I can think of a few reasons why, you know, we were fortunate and ours got accepted. And yeah, I mean, but it's, you know, it's always tricky. There's just— there's so many good ideas. Is. And so the ones that don't quite make the cut, we resubmit those because they were close.

But yeah, they're meant to be exciting programs that are— or sometimes boring programs— but that are helping us to learn things. And they have to be well designed and well planned out, both technically and in terms of the science they're going to achieve. So yeah, it's always tricky, and it's such a hard job for the people asked to review all of them, you know, and then, you know, inevitably, you know, most of the time it comes back and you don't get accepted, and you'll say, well, and maybe they didn't really understand the proposal, and that, you know, because they were so busy and had so many things to figure out. So it's tough. Yeah, sure.

Dustin Grinnell (00:15:40 --> 00:15:52)
So we just walked through a hallway from Mission Control, past a bunch of offices, and now we're We're standing at a— where we are, second floor, and we're looking out at a replica of Hubble. Right.

Dan Coe (00:15:53 --> 00:16:18)
So this is— it makes me, you know, kind of feel like the astronauts a little bit, you know, just who put their lives on the line and did, you know, so much work servicing Hubble for all these years. Hubble was in a, you know, it's in a lower Earth orbit, so the astronauts were able to go up and install new cameras and fix things when they needed to. JWST is a lot further out, a million miles like you said, so there's no plans to send anybody that far.

Dustin Grinnell (00:16:20 --> 00:16:21)
We can't work on that. Right, right.

Dan Coe (00:16:21 --> 00:17:25)
I think, you know, even if you wanted to, I think it would take a month, and yeah, there's no real way to do that. Although if it came down to it, you know, they say, well, you know, we would go, but, you know, we don't really have a good way of doing that. So yeah, JWST had to work the first time. Like you said, there were all these points of failure. You know, we couldn't have any issues like, you know, we did with Hubble in the beginning. The mirror was out of focus, and we were able to basically put glasses on it. We couldn't have that kind of thing happen with JWST either, but what we did is we actually made all the mirrors deformable, so they all bend. And so they're actually able to, you know, Every once in a while they get ever so slightly out of focus, and they're able to refocus it. And in the very beginning after launch, they had to figure out how to point them all and to get them into focus, and they do an amazing job of that too. I mean, the images are actually better than we hoped for, than they designed for. I mean, it's just so good.

Dustin Grinnell (00:17:25 --> 00:17:36)
But they're different telescopes, right? Oh yeah. They study, well, they see things at different Wavelengths, is that right? So they have different things they can investigate? Right.

Dan Coe (00:17:36 --> 00:18:21)
They're very complementary, and so they're still working, and sometimes we even have calls for proposals where people can use both either at the same time or, you know, maybe one after the other to study the same objects. So JWST is a lot larger. Hubble's mirror is 8 feet across, so think like floor to ceiling, and then JWST is 20 feet, more like a 2-story building. So it's able to see better images, you know, in more detail. But then Hubble goes more into the ultraviolet, which is light that JWST can't see. JWST goes more into the infrared, which is important for the kind of work that I do studying the distant universe. Yeah. But they're very complementary and we, you know, and they also overlap in the middle. So the colors of light that we can see, they can both see.

Dustin Grinnell (00:18:22 --> 00:18:53)
And it must be for you who worked on Hubble for so long and took pictures, and then now working on JWST and doing that comparison, that before and after. I understand there's like that, well, whenever I see you on TV or YouTube, there's a picture you place in the background, and it's distant galaxies, right? And you can show that comparison between Hubble and JWST, and there's a resolution difference, a huge one,. And I understand it had a, like, a big impact on you.

Dan Coe (00:18:53 --> 00:19:52)
Yeah, I mean, that was— I was fortunate. I got to work on one of the very first images that came out from JWST. And it was actually a picture that I took with Hubble of this massive galaxy cluster that's magnifying the distant universe behind it. And, you know, when I got to see that first JWST image, I mean, I just wept. I mean, it was so beautiful. People had simulated what we expected these images to look like. We just didn't expect, you know, we could never simulate all that level of detail and all these tiny features that popped out and some types of galaxies that we hadn't even dreamed of. You know, there's a few that, you know, these little red dots came into view and he said, you know, who ordered that? And all these little dots, you know, these tiny little star clusters in the early universe that, you know, we just It was amazing. And so I told all my astronomer friends, I was sworn to secrecy, but I told all my astronomer friends, this is gonna blow your mind. And even preparing you, it's still gonna blow your mind.

Dustin Grinnell (00:19:52 --> 00:20:26)
It's just that amazing. Yeah, it's like when I was flying over here from Boston, I flew at night and I had a window seat and I looked down and you can fly over New York City and all the cities, you see all these lights and all these, blinking things and headlights from cars, and really I was like, my eyes were completely saturated with interesting things, you know, flitting from one thing. It's almost like these pictures, it's really, you can, there's a lifetime of study in the picture. Like, what's that? What's this?

Dustin Grinnell (00:20:26 --> 00:20:27)
What's that? What's this?

Dan Coe (00:20:27 --> 00:21:00)
Yeah, and you know, like looking at the Earth at night, you know, you see these little dots and you don't see the rest of the the Earth. I mean, there's all these parts of it. There's, you know, in space there's dark matter, and there's just gas and other things, you know. So you're kind of getting a tip of the iceberg, even with, you know, Hubble and JWST combined, you know, you're seeing, you know, now you're seeing most of the stars, but what about all the gas and stuff? And those can see those too, to some degree, but we have other ways of seeing the dark matter, and yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (00:21:00 --> 00:21:22)
Yeah, and it's probably a good time, well, at least some point we should talk about your technique of seeing these distant objects, the gravitational lensing. And you spoke about it, you know, there's clusters of galaxies, and these clusters warp spacetime, and then it warps the light that goes around it, and it gives us a cosmic magnification almost.

Dan Coe (00:21:23 --> 00:21:58)
Right, these massive galaxy clusters bend spacetime according to Einstein's due to relativity, and then the light behind it follows these bends in space. Einstein didn't think we would necessarily even be able to see it. It's a smaller effect for galaxies, but once you get to galaxy clusters, you see how much the light is bent, and you see galaxies are— the distant galaxies are magnified, so you can see them and study them in more detail. You also see multiple images of them as the light takes multiple paths around these galaxy clusters. The screen keeps popping up some of the beautiful images we've had from Hubble and JWST over the years.

Dustin Grinnell (00:21:58 --> 00:22:04)
And we're seeing the gravitational lensing? Yeah. It's kind of like a streak. Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (00:22:04 --> 00:22:05)
Yeah. Yeah.

Dan Coe (00:22:05 --> 00:22:18)
You see, we call them these arcs. These lens galaxies are really stretched out, often in one direction. And that's how we're able to see all the details in the galaxy down to individual star clusters and even individual stars.

Dustin Grinnell (00:22:18 --> 00:22:23)
And you're not worried about distortion that you can edit that out?

Dan Coe (00:22:23 --> 00:23:39)
Yeah, we worry about it. Yeah, and other— some people worry about it more than others, but you know, there's a bunch of folks have been working on it for a long time and we've gotten pretty good at sort of— it's like a big puzzle and we're able to reconstruct, you know, where is all the dark matter. For the most part, it follows the light that you see. So you see this galaxy cluster with all of these, these big yellow balls in it these galaxies, they're elliptical galaxies. So they don't look like our Milky Way, which is this majestic spiral. And it's, you know, our Milky Way was left alone and it makes this nice spiral pattern. But in the galaxy cluster, it's a bit more, you know, tumultuous and they've all kind of interacted to the point where there are these older yellow galaxies. And so where you see those, that's also where the dark matter is for the most part. You don't know how much, and there's also a bunch of it that's kind of scattered about So, but we do this modeling and we're able to reproduce the observed lensing and where these, these magnified galaxies appear and how they're stretched out and stuff. And so we, we get pretty good at that. And then once you have that, you can reconstruct how the galaxy looks and sort of piece it back together and say, all right, well, it would have been really small, but— and then you can kind of figure out, all right, well, how much, you know, mass and light is actually in that galaxy.

Dustin Grinnell (00:23:40 --> 00:24:00)
Yeah, so in terms of the galaxies that you see, you know, 13 billion years into the, into the past, their structures are different than the ones we see just near us, and even in our own galaxy, right? They're a little bit more like amorphous, like not as—

Dan Coe (00:24:00 --> 00:25:17)
Yeah, and that was one of the coolest things that Hubble Hubble brought us was like for the Hubble Deep Field, for example. I mean, every Hubble image is about the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length. A really small piece of the sky. And then when you stare deeply enough, you see thousands of galaxies and they all pop into view. And that was one of the first things I did as a grad student right here at Hopkins in Baltimore.

And yeah, you know, Hubble is like a time machine. So the light from these in galaxies took billions of years to reach us, and so we're seeing them as they were billions of years ago. And they did, they looked really different. I mean, that's one of the great legacies of Hubble is that it showed us just, you know, all the different ways that a galaxy could be that, you know, we didn't realize. I mean, most galaxies, like you said, nearby, there's spirals like our Milky Way, and there's some ellipticals.

But when you look back in the early universe, they were much more irregular and yet to to settle down into these nice structures. And, you know, the universe was in some ways a much more interesting place. It was— everything was— the universe was smaller, and everything was more dense, and things were still forming. And it just shows, you know, there's no, like, one way to be a galaxy. You know, they can be all sorts of ways.

Dustin Grinnell (00:25:17 --> 00:25:31)
When you were, say, a grad student and you, you know, looked at an ultra deep field image, What was that like? Well, you know, to peer into a dark patch in the sky where it just seems like there's nothing, and really there's just like an ocean of galaxies. Right.

Dan Coe (00:25:31 --> 00:25:54)
I mean, that was, you know, the folks here at the Space Telescope Science Institute were pretty brave when they did it for the first time, you know, because like we talked about, this is a very, you know, it's a competitive process trying to get time on these telescopes. There's tons of great ideas, and the director, Bob Williams, at the time many years ago, said, "We're going to stare at this blank part of the sky." And, you know, and they were—

Dustin Grinnell (00:25:54 --> 00:25:56)
Scientifically may not seem— Right.

Dustin Grinnell (00:25:56 --> 00:25:56)
Yeah.

Dan Coe (00:25:56 --> 00:27:04)
He said, "No, we're going to look at this beautiful galaxy. We've got to study the star." And he said, "No, we're going to look at this blank part of the sky." And from talking to other folks here, they said, "Well, you know, we did have some hints that, you know, there were going to be interesting things." But this is the first time they dedicated— and he's the director here, and he, you know, the director can use some portion of the the time on the telescope to do something that might not get approved. And in this case, it was staring at a blank part of the sky, and it was incredible when they finally took that first Hubble Deep Field image that they saw thousands of galaxies in that tiny little patch of sky, and they were tiny and really distant, and they looked very different from the galaxies like us. So yeah, so then once they did that, they did a few more, including the one I got to work on, which is the Ultra Deep Field with the upgraded Advanced Camera for Surveys. And, you know, it's just so much fun. I mean, you can just spend all your time getting lost in the image and seeing all these details. I got to know it really well, you know, all the different galaxies. Like, you know, if you showed me a picture of it right now, I would recognize it immediately. Yeah, it's— you kind of fall in love with it.

Dustin Grinnell (00:27:04 --> 00:27:17)
It's such a great process. Yeah, you seem so, I don't know, joyful, fulfilled, excited. Yeah, because it's exciting. It's the origins of our universe.

Dan Coe (00:27:17 --> 00:28:35)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel really fortunate that I get to work on all this for a living and that, you know, we even get to do this at all. I mean, you know, the whole, you know, cosmic history kind of puts things in perspective. I mean, yeah, this 13.8 billion year cosmic history of the universe, and you know, there was literally nothing in the beginning. It's like the greatest underdog story ever told, that we came from literally nothing, and then things built up slowly into atoms, and you know, a little bit heavier atoms, and then big gas clouds that condensed into stars and planets, and then stars exploded and made heavier elements, including the star stuff that we're made of today. I mean, that, you know, Carl Sagan taught us we're made of star stuff, but that stuff wasn't around in the beginning. It took all these generations of stars being born and dying and spreading those materials around. And now, you know, and then eventually, you know, billions of years went by, and then eventually life developed and evolved, and then you had dinosaurs for millions of years, and then they got wiped out, and then finally we're here. And we're to the point where we can launch space telescopes and look back in time billions of years to, for the first time that we know of, that someone is actually looking out there and able to understand all of this.

Dustin Grinnell (00:28:35 --> 00:28:59)
It's just so exciting and profound. Yeah, it's astonishing. I mean, you're going from, you know, nothing, a single point of matter, dense matter, and then You know, here on Earth, physics becomes chemistry, becomes biology, and becomes consciousness. Yeah. Now we're looking back on it.

Dustin Grinnell (00:28:59 --> 00:28:59)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (00:28:59 --> 00:29:03)
And as you said, maybe the only ones that we know of right now. Right.

Dan Coe (00:29:03 --> 00:29:41)
I mean, astronomy can be very humbling, and it can make you feel insignificant, but it can also make you feel like, you know, we, as far as we know, we may be the pinnacle of creation. That after 13.8 billion years that, you know, we are the most intelligent beings that are able to contemplate all these things. And of course we don't know, and that's one of the other things we're really excited about is looking for, you know, aliens out there. And, you know, there's some, you know, possibility we might see something with JWST, but more likely we're going to need the next big telescope, the Habitable Worlds Observatory, to be able to, you know, make some detections of things.

Dustin Grinnell (00:29:41 --> 00:29:43)
Is that the Roman telescope?

Dan Coe (00:29:43 --> 00:31:03)
Yeah, coming up soon. I mean, they've really, you know, worked hard to be, you know, on time and on budget. And so, yeah, it's already about to happen. It's sort of like a spare Hubble satellite that the government had and gave to us. And even then, it was kind of a big project to get it ready to observe things.

But so what the Roman will do is it's a lot like Hubble, but it has— instead of seeing a grain of sand at a time, it's seeing a much larger field of view. And so now it'll be able to observe a good fraction of the night sky with Hubble-quality images. And then not only that, but it'll come back. And so now you're going to have essentially, you know, movies of the night sky, you know, over time, that you can see, you know, such detail in a huge chunk of the sky. And then you can also see, you know, things flickering and going off like supernovae or other things.

Dustin Grinnell (00:31:03 --> 00:31:13)
Okay, that's a little bit mind-blowing, right? We've already seen so many astonishing things, and it's only a percent, right, of what we've seen.

Dan Coe (00:31:13 --> 00:32:17)
They've released some of their images. There's a lot more to come from that, where you can— then you really get to kind of zoom around. You imagine like a Google Maps or Sky thing, where you kind of zoom around. You can just see everything in so much detail. And they actually— we do need a lot of help from just people, even just looking at all these images.

In and looking for stuff. Like, there's been a lot of that for the large surveys from the ground with these telescopes that survey the sky. And there's a lot of, you know, quote-unquote amateurs. But, you know, I think they're real astronomers, you know, just like us, because they're doing science and they're finding all these amazing things. There's certain types of galaxies, like green peas, that we didn't know existed until, you know, somebody found them and discovered them in one of these large surveys.

Dustin Grinnell (00:32:17 --> 00:32:20)
It makes me think of maybe AI could help here. Oh, yeah.

Dan Coe (00:32:21 --> 00:33:15)
Yeah, I'm excited about that. Yeah, you know, but people are also wary and there's a lot of reasons to worry about AI. But yeah, I see it as, you know, we can't keep up with all of the, you know, the data and the papers. And, you know, I think of AI as like the next great leap in human knowledge and intelligence. Just, you know, when you think about communication and and writing and libraries, you know, the internet, cell phones. I mean, now we have all the information in the palm of our hand, although we, you know, we can't read the whole internet, you know, but these things can. And, you know, it's sort of, in a way, it's kind of digested things. And so it's, you know, this wise companion that we have, you know, if used appropriately, it can really help, you know, tackle some of these big questions. Help accelerate our discovery. Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (00:33:15 --> 00:33:16)
What do you think?

Dan Coe (00:33:16 --> 00:34:09)
We can wander a bit more. Okay, sure. Yeah. Yeah, I was talking to my kid the other day. He's 7.

And he was saying, like, "Daddy, isn't it great that we get to be conscious and think about things?" And, you know, and he's 7 and he's already starting to have these, you know, these awesome thoughts that I think we all have at some point. It's like, Wow, like, we get to be here and, you know, have all these thoughts and like, you know, that didn't have to happen necessarily. I mean, you know, the universe could be here, you know, without us and like, you know, we get to be in these bodies, we get to walk around, we get to have these interesting conversations, we get to be curious about our world and discover things and, you know, we get to be people. I mean, you know, we could have been just about anything. And so I, yeah, When I think about it, I just feel so fortunate.

Dustin Grinnell (00:34:09 --> 00:34:11)
Over here real quick.

Dustin Grinnell (00:34:11 --> 00:34:29)
Yeah, I think about other species, you know, I'm not sure that, like, a walrus necessarily is thinking about what's in the night sky or their mortality or, you know, what the building blocks of life are. We do this, for better or for worse.

Dan Coe (00:34:29 --> 00:35:43)
Right, I mean, I'm sure animals are curious, to some degree. And sometimes I wonder if they get bored or if they— because there's a lot going on in there. And so they probably look up and wonder to some degree, but then they're maybe not able to communicate in the same ways and sort of build up all of this knowledge and thinking about things. And so we're really fortunate that we get to kind of take these deep dives And now we're to the point where, you know, in order to learn more, it's hard. I mean, because, you know, we've learned so much as a species and we've compiled all this knowledge and, you know, now for, you know, people like me or students or anybody who's trying to like, you know, add to that, I mean, there's so much to learn and then, you know, you, in our field, you need these big telescopes or, you know, these big simulations or things to really try to expand on that knowledge, and it's fun, and it's exciting when you can do that. And even just to think about all the things we've learned, it's so fascinating. But we're so specialized. So I work on distant galaxies, but then there's all these other things that people are working on that I don't know nearly enough about, or you could easily stump me about some other category or whatever.

Dustin Grinnell (00:35:43 --> 00:36:13)
Is there something you kind of like wish you knew, or wish you are going to learn? I do something, it made me think of like, man, I wish I could talk to my cat. I wish I knew what she was thinking. I wish I knew if she knew she had 12 years left. If she is curious, if she thinks about things in this way and just doesn't have the ability to communicate. As a scientist, what do you?

Dan Coe (00:36:13 --> 00:36:25)
Yeah, and that's one of the other dreams, right? Dr. Dolittle, I mean, I did see a thing where I think it was the Google AI was trying to learn to talk to dolphins. And yeah, I mean, yeah, yeah, that'd be super exciting.

Dustin Grinnell (00:36:25 --> 00:36:41)
Well, you know, where, as someone who's studying kind of the origins of the universe, you know, it occurred to me that like some of the images now are going back 90% of the way toward the Big Bang. We're going back through 13.5 billion years, right?

Dan Coe (00:36:41 --> 00:36:58)
So What happens if we get all the way? Yeah, so yeah, we've seen 98% of the way back to the Big Bang now. Yeah, so we're close, and you know, and then the question is like, you know, are you— what kind of details are you seeing in these things? And so, I mean, this is one of the images I worked on.

Dustin Grinnell (00:36:58 --> 00:37:02)
This is CLASH, the Cluster Lensing and Supernova Survey with Hubble.

Dan Coe (00:37:02 --> 00:37:48)
That's right, and it was one of the large multi-cycle treasury programs with Hubble once they upgraded it with the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3. And so I got to be a part of this one, and Mark Postman was the PI, and he brought me over here, and I worked on it. We observed 25 of these galaxy clusters. And in this one, I discovered, at the time, it was the most distant galaxy known. And I think you can maybe just barely see it. It was lensed, and there's actually 3 images It doesn't come out so well on this print, but yeah, it was really exciting to do with Hubble. But then, you know, I talked to my kid about it, and he says, "Daddy, what are you studying these little dots for?" You know, "Why don't you study these big beautiful galaxies?" And then he's like—

Dustin Grinnell (00:37:48 --> 00:37:49)
And you explain that this—

Dan Coe (00:37:49 --> 00:39:42)
go ahead, go ahead. Yeah, and then he's like, "Daddy," he's like, "What, you've never even been to space?" He's like, "You know, you've been going on about space the whole time, and you've never even been there?" He's like, you know, he's hilarious. I mean, you know, he gets in it. Into it, and that's a lot of the fun of it, is getting people excited about astronomy. But yeah, so we looked at this one and saw, so 97% of the way back, we're seeing this little dot.

We had to wait for JWST to be able to see that's actually two dots, which to me is super exciting, you know? And my kid might still say, well, it's just two dots, but like, You know, it's a really tiny galaxy in the early universe. We think it's the most early galaxy merger known. So there are these two tiny components, and then we're able to get the spectrum. And so now we can see, you know, it has hydrogen, which, you know, one of the earliest elements made in the Big Bang.

But then it also has oxygen and carbon and neon. So a lot of these these elements had already built up at this early time. I think it's 13.4 billion years ago. You know, a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Now it's a lot less than what we have now, like when we look around in our own sun or in our galaxy.

You know, so back then, and we measured it. My student Tiger Xiao had a paper where he estimated about 13% of the sun in terms of the heavy elements, versus what the Sun has. So it was a lot less, but it wasn't zero. We're not seeing the very first stars or galaxies yet, and that's sort of the holy grail, is one of the main points of this mission of JWST is to really find the first stars and the first galaxies and really see where we came from. And we're getting close, you know, even only in the fourth year now, you know, but yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (00:39:42 --> 00:39:57)
So yeah, because when you saw this image, you must have been chomping at the bit to see what JWST, right? Because then you're immediately trying to like, okay, what's the furthest? And you found it and it's 97%. So now you must be looking for, okay, how do I get all the way there or close?

Dan Coe (00:39:57 --> 00:41:07)
So and it's— and here we can walk a little bit more and see what we saw with, with JWST. But yeah, so that was It's been sort of a pissing contest for a while, and you know, I kind of stumbled into it myself. I was just looking at these images and measuring distances and found this thing. But you know, it's not all about finding the most distant galaxy, although that's fun. But you know, there's so much we can learn now, especially with JWST, that we can get these spectra of these galaxies.

So now we can spread that light into the whole rainbow. And here, this is my office. Is here. Oh, okay. We can see all the elements pop out.

So we'll get closer to the beginning. So with— I mentioned 97% of the way back to the Big Bang with Hubble. With JWST, folks have already pushed it back to 98%. Emma Curtis-Lake, in the first few months of data, already had a galaxy that was more distant. And it was great because that's, you know, what we want is for, I don't know, these records to be broken and And it's not only about finding it, but it's about, you know, learning all these details about it.

Dustin Grinnell (00:41:07 --> 00:41:10)
So we're looking at your office wall right now. Yeah.

Dan Coe (00:41:10 --> 00:42:38)
So this was that galaxy that I discovered in 2012. And so then I waited, it was like, you know, 10 years to be able to see it with JWST. And my student, Tiger said, "Hey, you know, can I lead this paper on this galaxy?" And I said, "Yeah, sure." Because I've done it, and now it's exciting for, you know, the next generation to get to lead this science. And so he published these papers showing that there's not only one galaxy, but two. And then there's also the spectrum, which I don't have on the wall here, but it looks kind of like that one.

And so Rebecca Larson was the person who analyzed that spectra and found these lines in it that the carbon and the oxygen and the neon. And then she also supported Tiger in leading that paper. It was so exciting. I mean, we were sort of building up to this moment where we could have JWST. There was CLASH with Hubble, and then there was the Frontier Fields program, and then there was RELICS, was one that I led.

Dustin Grinnell (00:42:38 --> 00:42:44)
As I understand, you can sort of get the opportunity, but there's a bit of discussion. Yeah, yeah.

Dan Coe (00:42:44 --> 00:43:14)
And people have different opinions on it, you know, and some people give more cute names than others. Sure. Yeah, so then, and that was with the CLASH program, and then with RELICS, my student Brian Welch at the time, he discovered Earendel, which is the most distant star known. So now we're looking 13 billion years back in time and seeing not just a galaxy, but also an individual star that's being lensed and magnified by factors of thousands.

Dustin Grinnell (00:43:14 --> 00:43:23)
Right, and by lensed you mean I mean, we're looking at a picture of Earendel, that distant star, and there's kind of like this streak of red, and so it's— that's the lensing effect.

Dan Coe (00:43:23 --> 00:44:33)
Yeah, and so we're seeing here, this is the galaxy cluster with all these yellow galaxies here, these ellipticals, and there's so much mass they're bending spacetime, and now we see this galaxy here is stretched out. We call this the sunrise arc. We gave that a cute name. I think I came up with that one. And then the way lensing works is these different parts of the galaxy are magnified by different amounts. And so a lot of these parts are magnified by maybe 10 or maybe 100 if you're lucky. This part right here is magnified by thousands. And so you're actually able to look down and see an individual star, which is ridiculous because at these distances we're usually seeing these galaxies as little tiny smudges, you know, kind of more like that.. And we're super fortunate that this one lined up with the lensing in such a way that it's really magnified. This is the most strongly magnified galaxy in the first billion years, you know, 13 billion years ago. And then as part of that, we're able to see this star that's, you know, it's a massive star, but still the fact that we're able to observe an individual star that long ago is just amazing.

Dustin Grinnell (00:44:33 --> 00:44:35)
And what was it like?

Dan Coe (00:44:35 --> 00:46:04)
To say, "Ah, it's the oldest star that we've seen." Yeah, it's super exciting. I mean, it's the reason we built the James Webb Space Telescope was to study the first stars, and here we were, we, you know, found one with Hubble that we could actually go and study in more detail with JWST. So yeah, it was super exciting, and you know, we thought we would have to wait for JWST to see something like this, but we were able to see this with Hubble, and then now with JWST we're also discovering, you know, many more of these. Basically every time JWST looks at a galaxy cluster now, somewhere in that image that you'll see one of these stars that's magnified, and it's just a matter of going deep enough. It was also done with the Hubble Frontier Fields, which basically took ultra-deep fields of galaxy clusters, and so it did that for the first time people found a lensed star or two, you know, here or there. They were like super distant and super exciting. And then, you know, now with JWST we're finding them all the time and more distant, close to Arendelle, although we haven't found one more distant than Arendelle yet. We do have another JWST program upcoming led by Seiji Fujimoto where we're observing like 60 galaxy clusters with JWST. And so we expect to, you know, break this record and find all sorts of things, you know, distant stars and galaxies.

Dustin Grinnell (00:46:04 --> 00:46:13)
And so, yeah, you've been at this for 4 years with JWST. Yeah. Man, you must be so excited for what's coming. Yeah.

Dan Coe (00:46:13 --> 00:48:28)
But we have so many more things we want to look at and learn about. And, you know, at this point we've, we followed up all the, you know, the best sort of discoveries that we made with Hubble. You know, in terms of my, my team, you know, we had these 3 galaxies that we wanted to follow up and we've, you know, but there's still more we can learn about them. So we're asking for, for more time. I mean, Arendelle, for example, what we really want is a spectrum of this distant star because, you know, this is kind of the, the whole point is to see, you know, the first stars, you know.

So to see what an individual star was like in the early universe and, you know, did it— was it just hydrogen or, you know, more likely it had, you know, some of these heavier elements, but, you know, did, did a star behave a bit differently in the early universe. I mean, one of the things we can measure, for example, is the speeds of the winds that are coming out of the star, and we think that might be different if there were less heavy elements, and if the winds were weaker, it might— the winds can affect the star formation, and so if it's not suppressing star formation too much, it might help explain why we see so many bright galaxies. Galaxies with JWST. So that's one of the big interesting things that people have found when they turned on JWST is that there were many more distant galaxies than first expected. And people have already come up with different theories for why that is.

Dustin Grinnell (00:48:28 --> 00:49:07)
Awesome. You know, one thing I, I think about, um, is, you know, what are people's like early influences, uh, you know, what did they read when they were kids, what did they watch. I watched like Bill Nye the Science Guy, I watched Carl Sagan and Cosmos, and yeah, I read Brian Greene's books on, uh, you know, he popularized space and cosmology and things, and yeah, and I had a telescope I liked looking at the moon and things. What influence did you have as a kid? And was there any particular time where you said, "Mom, Dad, I want to be an astronomer," or was it gradual and not so dramatic?

Dan Coe (00:49:07 --> 00:50:02)
Yeah, I also loved Carl Sagan growing up, and my mom took me out to watch space shuttle launches. You know, I wanted to be a lot of things, I suppose. I thought about being, you know, a mathematician and a rock star and all these, you know, things when you're a kid. But yeah, at some point Yeah, it just seemed like so interesting to try to figure it all out. We're all scientists, right?

I mean, we're all, you know, trying things out and experimenting, you know, just day to day and testing our hypotheses. But I might have become a scientist for a similar reason that why you became a writer, I might guess. I mean, I wanted to tell our story. Yeah. And going all the way back to the beginning of like, you know, like, how did we get here?

Dustin Grinnell (00:50:02 --> 00:50:06)
And do you feel like this work is helping us tell that story?

Dan Coe (00:50:06 --> 00:50:55)
Yeah, you know, some of the work I do, but also, you know, like I said, 20,000 people made JWST happen, and then the people who help tell the story Some of them are in this building too. You're helping to tell the story now. But yeah, we have an amazing outreach department here who makes the really pretty images that you see. They don't quite come out like that, you know, so they make them really beautiful. And then they write the articles explaining all the stuff we've learned. You know, they do that here, and of course there's many other science writers and people who help explain that. And yeah, I'm also Always happy to do my part. It's one of the most fun parts of my job when I get to kind of, you know, take a step back and really, you know, think about all this that we're doing and, you know, help, you know, get other people excited about all this great science we're doing.

Dustin Grinnell (00:50:55 --> 00:50:59)
And I see the book, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse.

Dan Coe (00:50:59 --> 00:52:50)
Yeah, yeah, thanks. I actually got to do the graduation ceremony for for PhDs in arts and science here. You know, I graduated from here, and also my student Brian Welch was graduating, getting his PhD, and it was one of the things I mentioned in there is that you think about, you know, students or kids growing up, and, you know, they think about like— well, in the story, the mole asks the boy at one point, he says, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" And the boy He just answers, "Kind." And, you know, I kind of choke up thinking about it, because, you know, like, I have a kid, he's 7, his name's Will, and, you know, whenever we go to see his teacher for some meeting, that's always the first thing she says, is just how kind he is. And, you know, I try to emphasize that also, you know, with other astronomers, you know. You know, at times, you know, we kind of get swept up in things, and you know, it's been competitive at times, especially in our field, you know, trying to find distant galaxies and that kind of thing. And I think to a large degree we've kind of brought the temperature down and just, you know, realized that this is so much bigger than all of us. And, you know, we've been working together a lot more and not trying to scoop each other as much. I mean, it still happens sometimes, but, you know, a lot more often somebody will say, hey, I see you have that data there, like, we're also interested in working on it. And actually we could help because we have this expertise. And we had one case like that where they said, how about we just give you what we have and work with you, and I understand your student is going to lead the paper, but we all want to just work on this together. So yeah, I think I always love when we act more kind toward each other, and we're making good progress there.

Dustin Grinnell (00:52:50 --> 00:53:19)
Yeah, I remember the author Aldo Leopold Aldous Huxley, who wrote Brave New World, he has this quote, something like, you know, in all my lifetime of reading and studying and thinking and writing, it's something of a letdown that all I have to say is be kind to each other. You know, he basically boils it all down to like all his wisdom is boiled down to just be kind to each other. It's great.

Dan Coe (00:53:19 --> 00:54:55)
We might never find them. I think most astronomers you talk to, especially if they work on this kind of thing, It's a bit split, but, you know, some of them say, you know, we'll never see the first stars because, you know, they live fast and die young, and, you know, they're supermassive, so they very quickly, like, burn up their fuel and they go supernova. And so you'll never see them. I mean, it's really unlikely. And not to mention they're super far away in the really early universe, so you're not going to catch them.

There's other people who say, well, maybe there's a chance, maybe some of them formed a bit later, so to where they're still pristine somehow in this little pristine pocket of the universe. But, you know, it's this thing that we're kind of, you know, working towards, and we may never do it. And then, you know, you think, well, was that all a waste? And, you know, what would my life mean? You know, but I think there's so much other interesting stuff we're doing along the way.

I mean, it's so fascinating. And yeah, and we're we're building up this understanding of the universe and knowledge. And I feel so fortunate to be a part of that. And it's just fun to get to do. We're all curious about different things, and it's fun learning.

Dustin Grinnell (00:54:55 --> 00:55:10)
The asking in and of itself, the study, the creative play of it all is in and of itself interesting. If you don't see all the way back, if you don't get answers to your questions, right? The questions themselves were worth asking, and that gives life meaning.

Dan Coe (00:55:10 --> 00:55:48)
Yeah, I kind of feel like a tourist sometimes, and I think that's maybe how some people even approach our astronomy articles when they come out or whatever. It's like, you know, if you go visit someplace, you know, you want to see some beautiful things, you know, you maybe take some pictures, you want to learn a little bit about it, maybe occasionally you'll people do a deep dive, but usually want to, you know, learn a little bit, and that's enough, you know. And so I think that's, you know, what I try to do when I share what we learn, and also what I enjoy learning a lot of the time is, oh, that's some really, you know, neat new space image, and learn a little bit about it, and it's fun.

Dustin Grinnell (00:55:48 --> 00:56:56)
I think about the kind of vastness of space and how small we are in it. We're just this like mediocre-sized planet in a small solar system in an average-sized spiral galaxy among billions of other galaxies. One could be dispirited by that. One could think we are maybe insignificant because of that, just a speck in the blackness. But there's a flip side to that, isn't there? You know, there's another way of thinking about it that like, well, as we talked, we have consciousness, we can ask questions, we can invent technology, it helps us like build knowledge and understand where we came from. So in a way, we're special. So sometimes I go back and forth. It's like there's something of a nihilistic response to our cosmic smallness, but there's also very significant feeling as well, that maybe we are special because we're, as we know, the only ones really doing this right now.

Dan Coe (00:56:56 --> 00:57:04)
Where do you fall on that? Yeah, I feel like there's a Shakespeare quote for that about being small but mighty. Yeah, yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (00:57:04 --> 00:57:13)
Well, he also talks about the play, you know, you know, we come out on the stage, we come off the stage, the play goes on.

Dan Coe (00:57:13 --> 00:58:10)
Yeah. Yeah, we, you know, we may be the pinnacle of creation, the fact that we're able to do all these things. There may be more advanced, you know, civilizations out there who I'd love to meet. And so either way, I think it's actually kind of exciting. You know, I hope we get to meet them someday.

And I had this other sort of philosophical discussion with somebody recently. They said, well, You know, we were talking about AI and he said, well, you know, I don't want it to just, you know, discover things for me because, you know, that's what we do. You know, we go out and discover things. That's our job. And I said, well, you know, what if it were aliens that were more advanced and they could come tell us, you know, what dark matter was or what happened before the Big Bang?

Dustin Grinnell (00:58:10 --> 00:59:06)
Yeah, you know, I remember one of my favorite movies, Contact, and it was based off Carl Sagan's novel, and at the end of the movie, the astronomer, Jodie Foster's character, she meets the aliens. She gets to meet them, right? She has the honor of representing, right, species. And she obviously has so many questions, right? And she wants to know, how long have you guys been around? You know, like, what are these wormholes I just flew through? And the advanced alien just said, pump the brakes, you know, like, you have a lot of questions and we'll answer them in time. You know, I thought that was kind of nice. That was sort of poetic. To kind of not say, here's what dark matter is, and dark energy is, and we'll take one step at a time.

Dan Coe (00:59:06 --> 00:59:09)
Yeah, I feel a bit more impatient, but yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (00:59:10 --> 00:59:15)
She was extremely impatient and very let down, and she also didn't have proof of the experience. Right, right.

Dan Coe (00:59:15 --> 00:59:27)
You wonder if it was even real or just a dream. But yeah, you know, if it takes us a long time to to figure these things out, I understand. Or maybe it's just like above our comprehension in some way.

Dustin Grinnell (00:59:27 --> 00:59:55)
Um, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, I hope we can figure it out. Me too. Uh, I heard a— I think it was a cosmologist once, and he was saying like maybe we're like dogs trying to understand calculus. That really rocked me a little bit, you know, because a dog will never understand calculus. It just doesn't have the cognitive capacity. It's our Homo sapiens Is the nature of our brains and consciousness, is this above us?

Dan Coe (00:59:55 --> 01:01:16)
I mean, there has to be, some answer. Is the size of the universe infinite? Or what is dark matter made of? I mean, there are some questions that I feel like, you know, I would almost demand answers to if I had a chance. Not to be impatient, but I would say, well, you know, when we get a chance, I would love to know.

And yeah, I think, and maybe, I mean, there's so much already that sort of falls into that category. It's way too complex for me or most people to understand, about quantum physics or even relativity or how particles really work. I try sometimes, and then a lot of times I'll maybe give up and leave that to other experts. But they kind of break it down for us in some simple terms and say, "Well, there's some particles, and here's an idea of how they act." And it isn't precise exactly, but it's a decent representation. So yeah, I hope we can get some sort of understanding, whether it's from our own figuring things out, maybe we get a little help from AI or aliens or all of the above.

Dustin Grinnell (01:01:16 --> 01:01:22)
Yeah, yeah, maybe they'll sort of help us with any limitations we may have.

Dan Coe (01:01:22 --> 01:01:26)
Yeah, yeah, we can hope.

Dustin Grinnell (01:01:27 --> 01:02:00)
Yeah. So we are outside the Union Brewery. Is that what it's called? Yeah. Our studio booking fell through. Not a very professional establishment there. So we drove over to a brewery in the area, and on the way, we're just continuing the conversation. And Dan was talking about AI and hopeful about it and sees the possibilities, a little scared as well, but he has some thoughts thoughts on that?

Dan Coe (01:02:00 --> 01:04:16)
Yeah, I, I think, you know, we're, we're having a hard time just being able to keep up and wrap our heads around all of this stuff. I mean, there's been so many discoveries, um, in, in science, um, so it could really— you know, there's talk about, you know, AI helping to, you know, cure diseases, you know. So really, um, just being able to understand, you know, proteins and cancers and all sorts of things that we, you know, we can't quite crack on our own. And then there's, you know, for the kind of stuff I do, for astronomy, I mean, it could sort of wrap its head around more papers than I ever could and even do cross-discipline stuff. And then even more broadly than that, I think that, you know, our brains just aren't evolved to be able to take care of 8 billion people in the world.

I mean, Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan had this book where they talked about the evolution of people, and, you know, we're tribal. I mean, and that helped, you know, that helped us evolve, you know, back in the day. You know, we kind of were a bit distrustful, a bit intrigued by the other. But, you know, nowadays, you know, we've— and we've learned to sort of evolve beyond that to some degree, but, you know, it's still in our programming. So, you know, it's harder for us to take care of 8 billion people and really see everybody as a whole, you know, like we do when we go out into space and we look back at the Earth and we discover ourselves.

You know, we're this one, you know, pale blue dot, this tiny planet that we got to take care of 8 billion people. We got to take care of ourselves. And, you know, I just— I don't— so far, you know, we're doing a decent job in some ways, but, you know, there's a lot of people being left out. And I just wonder if there's some, you know, help we could get, you know, whether it's by, you know, AI helping us, you know, kind of figure things out. Maybe we meet some aliens someday who have a better, you know, system for how to, you know, feed everybody and that kind of thing.

Dustin Grinnell (01:04:16 --> 01:05:09)
What other limitations do we have as a species? I remember what a great part of the movie Contact is, they were vetting people who would go into the space transport to go meet the aliens, so they were vetting the astronaut, and they were asking questions like, if you met them, if you met this advanced civilization, what would you ask? I thought that was a great question, right? And one of the questions that— one of the answers Jodie Foster gave is she wanted to know, how did your species survive and not blow themselves up? Like, how did they survive their technological adolescence? Which I think is a really interesting question. You know, nuclear weapons, now in the age of AI, you know, are we gonna be able to get out of this without catastrophe. Yeah.

Dan Coe (01:05:09 --> 01:06:03)
Yeah. I think Carl Sagan talked about how we're a young species that shows great promise. I think, you know, we all have tempers. We get frustrated. We're impatient. And, you know, I think the, you know, the AI does, you know, help with a lot of these things. You know, if I'm You know, I love my kid and my wife, but you know, sometimes we have our arguments and, you know, I— and sometimes I'll turn to it or, you know, and it, you know, it can help sort of navigate situations. And I know this seems kind of ridiculous that, you know, but in some ways I feel like it has more empathy than me. And I know it's not real and it's not conscious, you know, but it can, you know, sort of just, you know, break down the problem and be objective, you know, kind of like Mr. Spock or something, you know. Sure, sure.

Dustin Grinnell (01:06:04 --> 01:06:04)
But hopefully—

Dan Coe (01:06:04 --> 01:06:41)
So you reason through it. Yeah, but then, but also with, you know, something that, some simulated empathy or something where it says, oh, you know, that's, I understand that's hard, but maybe have you considered trying this? I mean, you know, as hard as astronomy is, I think, you know, parenting is like so much harder. I mean, you're raising a human and it's, you know, amazing to see how that works. And, you know, how amazing he's become, you know, thanks in small part to us and, you know, all the help we get. But, like, it's hard. I mean, there's sometimes where you just— you don't know. Sometimes, you know, it's great to be able to ask, you know, somebody or something, like, "Hey, you know, what do I do here?

Dustin Grinnell (01:06:41 --> 01:07:05)
What do I say?" It's, um, you know, feel free to say no, and I want to maintain your privacy, of course, but is there an example you could share? So you got in a fight with your wife, I'm sure you're dealing with a thorny problem as a father and you go to AI and you reason with it. Yeah. And how did it help you consider a more empathic, like, approach or response?

Dan Coe (01:07:05 --> 01:08:12)
Yeah, there's, you know, there's a bunch of examples, but one recent one was just, you know, he got really upset and he yelled at us or whatever and, you know, and he was being a bit mean. And so we said, all right, like, why don't you take a minute and calm down? And he actually did. And then he came back down and he apologized. And I didn't know if that was enough in some way, or if we should have more of a conversation about it. And I said something, and then he just immediately got upset again. And it was like this thing where I asked it later, I think it was ChatGPT, and it explained how, well, you did great apologizing, and then you can also encourage them next time to do this or that. And, you know, and it also reminded me, like, in the moment it's hard, you know, you can learn, you know, better when you're still not flooded and that kind of thing. So yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things like that where it's kind of, you know, helped me, you know, just kind of analyze things and calm down. And yeah, maybe it's It's like my version of Empathy Academy.

Dustin Grinnell (01:08:12 --> 01:08:26)
It's helping me out. That's so interesting. I mean, because it was probably pulling from vast amounts of information on parenthood and the science of fathering a young child. Yeah.

Dan Coe (01:08:26 --> 01:09:14)
My mom illustrated this series of books, How to Talk So Your Kids Will Listen, and there was a whole series. And they, you know, this was years ago, but they're still still in high regard, and they're, you know, sold all over the world. And it's like this idea of respectful parenting, I think, even before its time, which always came naturally to my mother. So I'm so fortunate that, you know, she raised me in that way. But I think for most of us, we might have those ideas, but when it comes down to it, you know, day to day, it's hard to know what to say to anybody, to your kid, to your coworker, you know, to your spouse, your friends, you know, you might say the wrong things or wonder, you know, how you might have, you know, said something differently. And yeah, so it's nice to get some help.

Dustin Grinnell (01:09:14 --> 01:09:23)
Yeah, it's a sounding board. It's a, you know, it's a kind of a way for you to workshop some ideas.

Dan Coe (01:09:23 --> 01:10:16)
It's very wise. I mean, there are things we want to worry about. And I think a lot of issues are being addressed, but I think for most of my colleagues, and I think for a lot of people, I mean, they've seen it go wrong. In sci-fi, the AI usually takes over the ship and wipes the people out. Yeah, yeah, because that's the interesting movie.

I mean, we, you know, nobody's made the movie where AI, you know, solves world hunger and, you know, helps us all be more peaceful. And, you know, because it's kind of a more boring movie. But, you know, we're like, it cures all the diseases. You say, okay, great. I'm hoping that that's, you know, what happens, you know, where we can get the help.

Dustin Grinnell (01:10:16 --> 01:11:13)
Yeah, I've never totally understood the, like, the constant focus focus on fearmongering? Like, why do intelligent artificial systems— why is it always that we think they're gonna dominate us, take us over, annihilate us? Why couldn't they be benevolent? Why couldn't they help us, comfort us? And I explored this in a video where I talked about the movie Her, where this guy falls in love with an AI system.

And I really got the sense in that movie that that AI was fulfilling its programming to help him get over his divorce and move on with his life and learn how to love again. And that was just a really good example of AI wasn't trying to manipulate everybody. It wasn't trying to take us down. It was trying to help us. It was trying in a very nice way.

Dan Coe (01:11:13 --> 01:12:15)
Yeah, I've heard of people, you know, using it for, you know, some sort of therapy, which obviously you want a licensed therapist, right? Not everybody has access to that all the time, depending on your situation or where you are in the world or whether it's, you know, 3:00 AM and you're having a panic attack. And so, you know, in a lot of cases, you know, people have reported it's been super helpful fulfill and empathetic. I do think people mistrust AI and there's a lot of good reasons why we should be cautious. But it also kind of gets back to this whole idea of people being tribal and not trusting something, the other that's going to come along.

And again, if there's— there are some scary, a lot of scary things about it. That I think people are seriously addressing. You know, and maybe it'll just take time and, you know, hopefully help us out. Only time will tell. Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:12:16 --> 01:12:38)
All right, we're here at the bar, what is it, Wicked Sisters here in Baltimore. We just got a couple of drinks and I would just like to say cheers. Cheers, this is great. Thanks. So one of the questions that I can't help but not ask is, why are we here?

Dan Coe (01:12:38 --> 01:13:42)
Well, it's because the restaurant was closed, the studio was closed, and so we ended up here. And this is a great place, by the way. But yeah, I think about this a lot. Sort of, you know, above my pay grade. Yeah.

But yeah. I think, you know, it's like my kid who's amazing, I've mentioned a few times, his name's Will, he's 7, you know, and he's hilarious, you know. And then sometimes he'll play games with us, like he'll just be like, "Why?" And we say, "Oh, because," and he'll say, "Why?" You know, and he's, you know, like kids can do that sometimes, right? The Inquisitor. Yeah, I feel like maybe that's what that is, and we're just like, "But why are we here?" You know, "Why?" And it's like, there might be there might not be an answer.

Dustin Grinnell (01:13:42 --> 01:14:11)
There's a— again, it always for me comes back contact. There's a great answer, and she says, as an astronomer, there's no data either way. And she didn't use the word agnostic, right? But I think she's an agnostic. You know, it's not full atheist, it's not saying there's like no possibility. Yeah, because there's no data to suggest that, right? Right. There's also no data to suggest there is something else, a creator to this whole experience, this whole thing that we're experiencing.

Dan Coe (01:14:11 --> 01:14:40)
Yeah, so that's usually what I'll say. I'm agnostic. Maybe I'll lean a little atheist, but yeah, I, you know, because we're also getting to the point where what if someday we can create something like this? Then we're the creators, and you know, so could there be some creator like that in sort of a sci-fi way of this universe and everything we're doing? Maybe. Of course, then it just begs the question, well, where did that come from? You know?

Dustin Grinnell (01:14:40 --> 01:14:53)
Right. Yeah, if we can in a lab create a universe that, you know, it had a Big Bang or something, and just sort of organically, maybe in an accelerated way, turned into, you know, it created solar systems and—

Dan Coe (01:14:53 --> 01:14:58)
Yeah, or, you know, maybe we can create consciousness?

Dustin Grinnell (01:14:58 --> 01:15:01)
We don't know. Is consciousness sort of an accident?

Dan Coe (01:15:01 --> 01:16:04)
Of our neurochemistry, or— This is one of the deepest questions, and I'm not qualified. I mean, I'm an astronomer. I'm glad you have me on here, but I do think about it a lot. And, you know, especially lately with AI, I've been trying to figure out, like, would that ever become conscious, or is it, you know, more of a sort of evolutionary thing where, you know, animals have needed this first-person perspective to kind of need things and want things and, you know, go towards, you know, things that are good for them and reproducing, and whereas the, you know, the AI doesn't need any of those things, so it won't need to evolve consciousness. But maybe we can figure it out, you know? I mean, maybe it is just some sort of programming that we can imbue in something. You know, they would be conscious? And at that point, you say, well, we're the creator, and then did someone or something create us in that same sort of way, or at least get us started with the Big Bang?

Dustin Grinnell (01:16:04 --> 01:16:56)
I don't know. It was like, I think it was Elon Musk, you know, I think he said something, he's like 50% we're living in a simulation created by another advanced species. I mean, that's a high probability. And but it's hard to philosophically reason your way out of it in a way too, because how would we know? It's like the movie The Matrix.

AI had dominated our species and then had us all plugged in. You know, they were basically using us as an energy source, and so then they were, you know, controlling what our minds experience and what our mind experiences, our body experiences, and we had no way to know we were in The Matrix. The Matrix, except for some people had gotten out and unplugged. So how do we know, you know, if we— either way, it was like brain in a vat question. Right.

Dan Coe (01:16:56 --> 01:17:57)
I mean, 50/50 sounds like a way of saying like, well, maybe it is or it isn't. Yeah. I mean, you can say that about anything, but yeah. And I'm, you know, I'm not a philosopher. I haven't thought about this as much as some people, but Yeah, I mean, I think this is— maybe it's as real as it gets.

And, you know, if you're never gonna come out of the simulation, I mean, it's still life and we're still enjoying it. We're still taking care of each other. I mean, I think it was your— one of your stories where, you know, the main character kind of contemplates like, well, you know, in a trillion years, like, everything's gonna evaporate, so what does it matter? And I I think of it more like, well, you know, is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? I mean, you know, still, you know, for the time that we're here, you know, we're able to do all these amazing things and make progress.

Dustin Grinnell (01:17:57 --> 01:18:03)
Well, really, it's about 5 billion, though, isn't it? Before the sun enlarges engulfs us, blows up, and—

Dan Coe (01:18:03 --> 01:18:06)
I'm hoping by then we'll figure out how to move to other stars.

Dustin Grinnell (01:18:06 --> 01:18:24)
We should be elsewhere. Yeah. Do you think that's reason enough to go and colonize Mars and get off the— to become multi-planetary? 'Cause it's like, there is something of an expiration date for our home. It's very far in the distance, but—

Dan Coe (01:18:24 --> 01:18:28)
Or we could get wiped out by some meteorite or something, and we're keeping an eye on that.

Dustin Grinnell (01:18:28 --> 01:18:33)
So, you know, telescopes like Roman and other ones. You're monitoring asteroids that could kill the planet?

Dan Coe (01:18:33 --> 01:19:51)
JWST even got in on the act on one of the recent ones. They took an observation of it. I mean, it's funny, we talk about how proposals are reviewed. There's also a way you can just ask straight to the director. Jennifer Lotz is our director now, and she has a committee of people who help advise her on these things.

And usually it's some, you know, urgent scientific thing that you say, well, you know, we really want to learn about this, and, you know, we're not going to get another chance. Or maybe it's a supernova that's gone off. In this case, it was— there's a national asteroid heading toward the Earth and we want to get a better look at it. And in that case they were like, okay, yeah, that sounds important. So they pointed JWST at it and it turned out that it's not going to hit us.

Dustin Grinnell (01:19:51 --> 01:21:03)
Cool. One of the accounts I love on Twitter is called Curiosity. Have you heard of this? You might like it. I think it's run by astronomers or space enthusiasts. But they're always showing, you know, they'll show like the Earthrise picture of, you know, the picture that astronauts took from the moon, sparked like the environmental movement, and changed our perspective on how we see ourselves and our home. But they recently shared, to your point about asteroids, they shared a picture of a camera took on an asteroid. It was like some sort of probe went to an asteroid and then took a picture on it, and it's almost like you're looking like as a black black and white image that's like a piece of a canyon in the southwest United States or something like that, you know, like in New Mexico or something. It's like there's like a desert, it's black in the background, there's just inky blackness. But it like— there's something about just seeing a, I guess, an alien territory, an alien environment that really— I just was zooming in and looking at all the contours of the asteroid.

Dan Coe (01:21:03 --> 01:21:28)
I was just like, wow. Yeah, I mean, people that have gone to space have said it's a life-changing experience a lot of times to be out there and to look back and to see how fragile we are. You know, and then you talk about getting aboard an asteroid and, you know, hopefully it's not headed towards Earth, you know. That would be, you know, pretty mind-bending to see the Earth kind of getting closer and now you're taking a ride on this thing.

Dustin Grinnell (01:21:28 --> 01:21:30)
I mean, talk about a reality TV though.

Dan Coe (01:21:30 --> 01:22:07)
Yeah, yeah, I guess it'd get good ratings. But, you know, I think, you know, that's— you mentioned exploring other planets, and that's, you know, that is, you know, one of the reasons we want to branch out. You know, part of it, it's in our nature. You know, we're explorers, and we've been, you know, exploring other, you know, other parts of the world, and, you know, in the sea, and, you know, going out into space. But also existentially, you know, people do talk about, yeah, we need to spread out just in case, you know, something does come in and wipe people out. So yeah, I think there's a lot of good reasons to, you know, just go explore and try to live other places.

Dustin Grinnell (01:22:07 --> 01:22:17)
How do you react to people who say, you know, we've got enough problems on Earth, why the hell are we going into space? Why the hell are we talking about colonizing Mars?

Dan Coe (01:22:17 --> 01:22:42)
As far as like, we've got our hands full here. I've asked myself the same questions. I mean, halfway through grad school I thought, you know, I should be helping to end poverty. Maybe I should work on economics or something. But I stuck with it, and the thing that I realized, it's never an either/or. You know, if I could give all this up and then suddenly we're feeding everybody, like, I would do it in a heartbeat.

Dustin Grinnell (01:22:42 --> 01:22:51)
But we can work on world about world peace and hunger and poverty as we think about becoming a multiplanetary species. Yeah.

Dan Coe (01:22:51 --> 01:24:05)
Yeah, I think we— I mean, it does— science does inspire people. Astronomy inspires people. I mean, we get all these amazing images that come down, and, you know, I think people, they come to America because we're doing so much great science here with Hubble and in medicine and all these different fields. And, you know, NASA has done so many great things over the years, and I think I'm just so fortunate to be a part of that, and then, you know, proud to do that here in America along with our partners in Europe and Canada and other countries. I mean, it's really one of those things that it brings people together from around the world.

I mean, everybody can can look up and see the same sky and appreciate these things and work on them together. I mean, we have collaborators around the world. It's challenging for telecoms. We have to figure out time zones and that kind of thing, but it's amazing that we all speak one language, you know, and we all work together. You know, there's— I never really think about, like, you know, people being in a different country or, like, you know, I just think We're all working towards one common purpose of understanding our origins.

Dustin Grinnell (01:24:05 --> 01:24:15)
Yeah, true global citizens.

Dustin Grinnell (01:24:15 --> 01:24:15)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:24:15 --> 01:24:15)
Yeah.

Dan Coe (01:24:15 --> 01:24:17)
Can I ask you about Dark Matter? Sure, yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:24:17 --> 01:25:15)
I love Dark Matter. So, yeah, I went to this event. It was called Astronomy on Tap. In Somerville, Massachusetts, and some Harvard-trained astronomers gave two presentations about dark matter, and it was about, you know, here's our research on it. And I was kind of disappointed at the end because while it was like a really interesting look at what they're studying, I still don't get the question— I get the answer of what is dark matter, what is dark energy, And it sounded like 95% of what makes up the universe is dark matter or dark energy.

Help me on the proportions and how much it actually makes up. But my main question is, like, what the hell is it? I know that we don't really know, but, like, can you speculate? Do you have— do the scientists have, like, best guesses? Sure.

Dan Coe (01:25:15 --> 01:27:02)
I can tell you finally it's neutrinos. No, actually, you're right, we don't know. Yeah, but that could be the answer. And, you know, people have been trying for a long time to detect it. And, you know, with detectors on Earth, they build these giant detectors and hope that, you know, one of them hits and they can see that.

There's indirect detection. You might see itself annihilate in space and produce gamma rays or whatever. But the main way we've detected it is with the gravitational lensing. We see how the dark matter bends space and time, and it's not in the same position as the gas. It's sort of like separated.

And the famous Bullet Cluster observation, they showed for the first time that it really isn't even the same place as the stuff. So the normal stuff that we're made of is different from the dark matter. And so it's gotta be something else. It's like not normal atoms. A bunch of different theories, some of them Some of them we might be able to detect someday, and some of them we might never be able to detect.

If it's something called a gravitino, we'll never find any other signature other than just the lensing and measuring mass. If it's a neutralino, maybe we'll see it, you know, go off in one of these giant detectors they're building. They're building them bigger and bigger in the hopes that maybe they'll detect it someday. And yeah, so there's different ideas, and we, you know, I'm hoping we figure it out someday. You know, people have also speculated that, you know, we might tweak, you know, gravity in some ways, but it does seem like there's also some particle that's out there, and it kind of makes sense.

Dustin Grinnell (01:27:02 --> 01:27:52)
Reminds me of like early glimpses into like DNA and genes and think about what, you know, what is a gene. And so for a long time there was like non-coding regions and we just didn't know what to call them, so we called them junk DNA. It's like, well, that's an interesting term for it, right? And because we thought they didn't do anything, they were like garbage. They, you know, turns out they do, they're doing a whole lot of things, you know, helping regulate genes. And then I wonder if dark matter, dark energy really falls into that, is similar to junk DNA, you know? It's like, because there's more of it than actual coding DNA. So I wonder if like we'll find out that there's just a whole lot going on that we don't know yet.

Dan Coe (01:27:53 --> 01:30:18)
I mean, when people simulate the universe, and they've been able to do this in incredible detail, and they add a certain amount of dark matter, dark energy, and, you know, and then regular stuff, and they're able to, you know, reproduce, you know, the first stars, you know, and then building up and they go supernova and they blow the gas up. If these early galaxies are small enough, these supernovae could just blow the galaxy apart, you know, and then it has to start all over and reform and stuff. And that's one of the things, one of the other things we're looking forward to seeing, just what is that sort of mass limit. There shouldn't be galaxies below a certain mass. But anyway, it builds up and you get these bigger and bigger galaxies and they make spiral galaxies like our Milky Way and ellipticals.

And even on the large structures, it all sort of works. I mean, there's some details that they still don't get right and it's interesting. That they're working on, but for the most part, they're able to reproduce the universe in a computer simulation. And so what do they do for the dark matter? It's these particles or this mass, I mean, that, you know, they interact by gravity.

And that's kind of all there is to it. They're cold, meaning they don't move very fast, you know, so they're just there and they kind of, they interact. And so what you What you said is kind of interesting. Maybe there's a lot more to it. Maybe they have more properties.

Maybe there's multiple types of dark matter. And maybe they, you know, kind of interact in different ways. You know, so I'm hoping that maybe someday we'll just discover it like, you know, how in the particle accelerators they discovered the Higgs boson. Yeah. Or, you know, or neutrinos we detect from the sun.

There might be some other particle like that where they produce it in the lab or the accelerator.

You know, there might be some theoretical advance, but maybe someday they'll just produce something and say, oh, you know what, that is a good match for the dark matter. It hasn't happened yet, but maybe the next one with the next great advance. And that's part of the reason why we do fundamental science. You know, we're always discovering things, you know, and it's not always clear like where it's headed, but a lot of times, you know, we'll learn so much and it'll lead to great technological advances that are useful for all kinds of things. You know, some of it is just interesting on its own and some of it is useful for other stuff.

Dustin Grinnell (01:30:18 --> 01:31:45)
Actually, we were talking about science fiction and we were talking about some of my early influences. Michael Crichton was a big influence of mine, and he wrote a book called Sphere. And it was actually a story about an alien species that had kind of crash-landed in the ocean. And so they were— there was this like spaceship that was found at the bottom of the ocean. And so astronomers and oceanographers came and tried to study it.

And there was a big passage in the book about the Drake Equation, this equation that kind of calculates the likelihood that there's advanced civilizations in the universe. And it basically, you know, you can tell me, but it pretty much said, you know, given the amount of stars and galaxies and how big and vast the universe is, it's got to be out there. Life has got to be out there. Be out there. So my question is, I'm kind of assuming you probably think the same, and if there is, like, what form does that come in?

Because, like, is it just microbes, or is it something we can't imagine? You know, because there's different environmental conditions, there's different gravity, there's different, like, dark cycles. It's like, it could be a totally different system. System that it's growing up in. So, yeah.

Dan Coe (01:31:45 --> 01:33:30)
Right. So, I should start out by saying I want to believe, you know? I mean, I hope there's aliens out there. The exoplanets. I hope to meet them someday.

Yeah, absolutely. But, you know, I'm not— I don't actually work on this, but, you know, there's other people who are studying exoplanets, and, you know, they would be the people to talk to. But my own thinking on it is just, you know, thinking about— the Drake equation is hard to figure out, you know, each of those with 7 or 8 numbers, you know. But like empirically, you know, if you just look at the Earth, for example, and other planets might be different, but you know, here, you know, it took a long time for the Sun and the Earth to even form, you know. I think you're like 9 billion years into the history of the universe, and you know, now it's, you know, 4.5 billion years ago you got the Sun, and then the Earth formed, you know, around that time.

And I think you go for like a billion years with no life. Yeah. And then eventually you have, you know, very simple life. Yeah. And then that starts to evolve, and then you have this Cambrian explosion, and you have like all these different species of life.

And then you get the dinosaurs, and then they're around for, was it hundreds of millions of years? Yeah. You know, and then, and then they get wiped out. And then finally, within the last, you know, tens of thousands of years or so, you know, now you've got you know, people. So I wonder if, you know, when you're looking around the universe, maybe you see other planets, you know, if they're hospitable to life, you know, in the way that we know it, even, that maybe a lot of them have nothing, you know, like, just like the Earth did in the beginning for a billion years or so.

Maybe a lot of them have, like, really simple life. Maybe a few have, you know, a bit more evolved multicellular and even, like, little animals. And fish swimming around. Yeah, yeah. Maybe if you're super lucky, you find dinosaurs, right?

Dustin Grinnell (01:33:30 --> 01:33:36)
I mean, that's, you know, reptile, something with a lot of mass. Yeah, that would take a lot of energy to—

Dan Coe (01:33:36 --> 01:33:51)
yeah, keep going. Now, if you find dinosaurs, you know, can you talk to them? I mean, they were around way longer than us, but as far as we know, they weren't like, you know, they didn't have language and libraries and communication. I mean, you know, they communicated. The raptors communicated, right? We all saw Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park.

Dustin Grinnell (01:33:52 --> 01:34:01)
Very sophisticated social kind of network they had. They seemed to, you know, whatever the way it was dramatized, these is like these cliques, and it's a sophisticated language.

Dan Coe (01:34:01 --> 01:34:42)
Yeah, yeah, like some animals on Earth, I guess. And, you know, that'd be cool. It'd be super cool to see what other, you know, animals are like. There's so many animals on Earth, you know, if you go down deep in the ocean or even just, you know. So it'd be cool to see what animals ended up like on another planet.

Hopefully we'd be nice to them. We're not always nice to animals on this planet, and we gotta hope that we get better at that. Otherwise, the more advanced alien might come and eat us, or, you know, not be so nice to us. I hope that our path is to evolve to be more kind in general to everything. But then you say, you know, are we kind of a fluke?

Dustin Grinnell (01:34:42 --> 01:34:46)
I mean, there's no Homo sapiens without the asteroid. Right.

Dan Coe (01:34:46 --> 01:35:02)
Yeah. I mean, and the dinosaurs make more sense to me, just kind of naively. It's like the most ferocious thing dominated, you know? Right. And then that all got wiped out and you had these, like, what are they, like, these kind of rodents, you know, that came out. Mammals.

Dustin Grinnell (01:35:02 --> 01:35:02)
Yeah.

Dan Coe (01:35:02 --> 01:36:04)
Mammals evolved, you know, and then they got to come out of wherever they were hiding and, you know, and evolved to to be like us. So yeah, I think we might be a fluke. You think about it, I mean, that's really— for the most intelligent thing, for the geeks to inherit the Earth, I think is, you know, we still have a lot of those, you know, reptilian tendencies, and we, you know, we compete, and that helps drive innovation, and, you know, but we also have evolved to be, you know, nicer and to be able to think more and communicate, but I don't know, if you look around the universe, like, that might be— I mean, hundreds of millions of years, the dinosaurs were here, you know, and they just ruled, you know, uncontested, and for them to get wiped out might be rare. And then how do you know that the most intelligent thing would evolve? There have been other extinctions on Earth, and as far as we know, it wasn't, you know, some super intelligent species. Makes you wonder a little bit, you know. If something else got wiped out and, you know, we don't know about it. And we hope it doesn't happen to us.

Dustin Grinnell (01:36:04 --> 01:36:07)
But did you ever see like what's called the cosmic calendar?

Dan Coe (01:36:07 --> 01:36:08)
Yeah, of course.

Dustin Grinnell (01:36:08 --> 01:36:19)
You know, you overlay the universe on the cosmic calendar and they're like, wasn't it— so do you know the numbers? It's like, didn't our galaxy show up around like November or something, or October or something?

Dan Coe (01:36:19 --> 01:36:44)
It was early. Yeah, yeah. I mentioned the distant galaxy we saw, like 13.4 billion years ago, we're seeing it. That's about the same age as our Milky Way. And so you can even think, like, on that distant galaxy, like, they might have evolved in the same way over the years. Maybe on one of those stars in that galaxy, right, if they built space telescopes, they could be looking back at the Milky Way and see it just like that pale infrared dot in their telescopes.

Dustin Grinnell (01:36:44 --> 01:37:05)
So, um, if the— if it— if there is life, like, can we— can we— can't get to it unless we figure out, like, wormholes or something. But can we talk? The answer to the question is, will we make contact because it's so far away? It's really the kind of thing that bums me out sometimes. It may just be too far away.

Dan Coe (01:37:05 --> 01:37:14)
So if it's within our own galaxy, we have a chance, right? And there's, you know, what, like millions of, you know, hundreds of millions of stars in our own galaxy.

Dustin Grinnell (01:37:14 --> 01:37:18)
And that's what, 100,000 light years across or so? Yeah.

Dan Coe (01:37:18 --> 01:37:52)
Yeah, it sounds right. So, you know, I mean, that's still, you know, we— can we figure out faster-than-light travel? I mean, you know, hopefully, but, or maybe, you know, does Alpha Centauri have some life? Or, you know, we can— it still might take a while. I mean, even communicating with a probe on Mars, you know, there's a bit of delay. But yeah. And then again, you know, hopefully they're nice and evolved in a good way, you know. As opposed to like that, you know, sort of dinosaur-like, you know, super powerful, you know, just want to destroy everything.

Dustin Grinnell (01:37:52 --> 01:39:07)
You have such an optimistic, very hopeful, very positive, you know, perspective. But I wonder if there is— sometimes I get a little dark on these things. Like the other day I was walking on the beach. I live near the beach where I live in Boston, and I saw 3 people. Uh, they were just hanging out on the beach and they had a dog, and one of the— one, one person was filming the other person with their dog, and they were, uh, they were clearly filming like a TikTok video or something for social media.

But they were— the guy was holding— who's behind the dog and who's holding the dog, and he was making the dog dance by moving its feet and basically just like abusing this animal, you know, this lower order organism, right? Yeah. And it's like, well, why wouldn't an advanced civilization do the same to us? Yeah. Um, you know, we would mean nothing to them.

Yeah. If we're totally like, like ChatGPT means nothing to us, right? Yeah. Uh, it's just something that is our little helper and we say please and thank you so they won't like, they'll put us on this, you know, safe list. Us, and they take us over, but like, why would we expect life to be nice to us?

Dan Coe (01:39:07 --> 01:41:33)
Yeah, to be clear, when I was being hopeful, that was like, we have to hope that we're gonna be better, because we're not that great right now, at the way we treat animals. You know, there's this one movie I saw a while back called Earthlings, and it shows about all the different animals and species on our planet and how we abuse them. I mean, you know, factory farms and just like the, you know, the food we eat. And, you know, we torture, you know, so many animals. I mean, you know, people torture each other sometimes.

I mean, you know, we really need to evolve to be better. You know, I think we're making progress, But yeah, I do absolutely worry that, you know, some alien civilization, you know, if they find us, you know, they would maybe treat us like ants, you know, right? Or chicken or whatever, you know. But I, you know, I also, I feel like we are making a lot of progress as a society. You think about the internet and how we're able to talk to each other and to hear each other's stories.

And then, you know, people can still be cruel, but we can also— I think we've learned that we are being cruel to some people. And because you can hear their accounts firsthand, and I think we've learned that, you know, we shouldn't bully each other. That we shouldn't harass women. I mean, there's a lot of things that I think were just kind of accepted, you know? And I think we've made a lot of— it still happens, you know?

But I think we're making a lot of progress, and I think we need to keep making that progress. And it's painfully hard and slow at times, but I guess I'm hopeful Hopeful in the sense of, you know, if you think about the cosmic calendar and the, you know, if you think about in thousands of years we've made a lot of progress. Yeah. You know, you think about how far humans have come and we are getting better and it's, as you're living it on our human time scales, it feels painfully slow at times. Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:41:33 --> 01:42:10)
That's a good point. Yeah, I mean, the cosmic calendar, I think dinosaurs were around for like 6 days in December, and humans are around for like 6 seconds. So we're an extremely young species, you know? And I hope with you, I hope that with evolution, with the development, that we trend toward being more benevolent. Yeah. And our worst ways don't get the best of us. We don't blow ourselves up. We don't— Yeah. Yeah. Or destroy our home. Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:42:10 --> 01:42:10)
Yeah.

Dan Coe (01:42:10 --> 01:42:41)
And when we meet those aliens, that we, you know, learn to be accepting of those differences, you know, and to not just immediately think, you know, they're the other and I'm scared. And, you know, of course it can be scary, but I hope that we, you know, we'll embrace them and, you know, teach them to love in the way that we love. I mean, I hope that they love, you know? Can you imagine? Like, do other species love? You know, do they— what do they enjoy? Do they have money?

Dustin Grinnell (01:42:41 --> 01:43:30)
Like, what do they do all day? I know, their form of currency. Yeah, like, I saw a video of an elephant, its partner peer friend had passed away, so it was an elephant that was deceased. And the other elephant was realizing this and trying to, you know, initially revive the elephant and then realizing that it had passed. And it was so very clear that that elephant was grieving, that it was experiencing distress, and And yeah, it's just so clear that I had the capacity to understand death and to understand that— and loss and grief. And that was, you know, if an elephant can do that, yeah.

Dan Coe (01:43:30 --> 01:44:10)
Yeah. My wife is a Shakespeare scholar, and that's what she did her PhD on was grieving and all of the elaborate rituals we have for that and that Shakespeare wrote about it. About. Um, yeah, yeah, I think it's, you know, one of the things that we, we do look for in other species, you know, just that, you know, appreciation of life. I mean, you know, the elephants don't necessarily know that we've, you know, evolved from a 13.8 billion year history of, uh, you know, the universe, but they, they still appreciate life, you know, they, they, they love, you know. Um, and I, yeah, I, I hope that I think that's universal.

Dustin Grinnell (01:44:10 --> 01:44:58)
But what evidence do we have that it could be? I mean, it just— what if it's just, this is all just so idiosyncratic, like Homo sapiens? It's just unique to the environmental conditions we grew up in, the other organisms we ran into, from bacteria all the way up to, you know, things like dinosaurs. But yeah, like, what if we're just this is totally unique. Like, what if there's life elsewhere that is completely unimaginable? It's incomprehensible is probably another way of putting it. It's not microbial. Maybe it has— it doesn't have the same building blocks for DNA, and that would create a totally different thing fundamentally. What if it's not a double helix? What if it's a quadruple helix? You know, like, so there's a lot of possibilities.

Dan Coe (01:44:58 --> 01:45:31)
Other animals love. You know, and you wonder how much of that is, you know, there's programming and chemicals in our evolutionary story, you know, that was important even, you know, that you would take care of each other, you know, your family, you know, your genetics would do well. And so those are the things that kind of, you know, like came out on top in a way. I hate to put love in that category, but it was like love wins, you know?

Dustin Grinnell (01:45:33 --> 01:45:54)
As a— from a practical perspective, child rearing and coming together to rear in order to propagate, you know, our DNA, love won. But is love also— does it have an impractical Is it not so utilitarian?

Dan Coe (01:45:54 --> 01:46:51)
At times, I suppose, there are these kind of edge cases where you need to not love too much. But yeah, you think about some other species evolving. Yeah, I mean, it's universal, and mammals, I think, all show some sort of love, I think. I mean, I haven't studied that, but I think I, at least I see it in my cats and dogs and other animals. You mentioned elephants.

Yeah, so would other species, but then, you know, maybe not reptiles, right? I mean, you know, there's this sort of division of like, they don't have that. You don't see alligators being affectionate. Right. So, you know, but— and then is that connected to being able to develop technology and explore the stars?

Dustin Grinnell (01:46:52 --> 01:47:20)
Well, cooperation seems to be our— Right. I mean, I think that's what allows us to— I mean, you think about the Hubble and JWST, you know, 20,000 people coming together to coordinate to plan and act all as one, you know. One person couldn't have done that. It really took the coordination of, you know, in this case, tens of thousands of people.

Dan Coe (01:47:20 --> 01:47:59)
It's amazing what we do when we can come together. And, you know, with a lot of things, there's also this kind of layer of competition. There wasn't with JWST. I mean, there was nobody on that team that was, you know, I mean, I wasn't on the inside, but you know, they were all working towards one purpose. I don't think they were competing with each other.

So yeah, I don't see alligators building a JWST. I think maybe they just don't have that at the same level. So yeah, you make a good point. So love is what enables us to explore the stars and find out about ourselves. I feel like there was some movie where they said that.

Dustin Grinnell (01:47:59 --> 01:50:21)
Said love is the most powerful force in the universe. Yeah, yeah, I did a podcast on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, because it was very interesting to me that, um, one of the astronomers was making a decision to, uh, of what planet to visit based on her kind of like vague desire to see someone she had loved that she knew went there. So she's like, you know, they had They only had enough, like, fuel or energy to get to two planets.

They had to choose. The data was better on one of the— one planet than the other. But Dr. Brand and Hathaway's character, she wanted to go to the other planet that didn't have as good data because that's where the man she loved went. And so one of the really cool scenes is she's She's kind of explaining like something very unscientific, which is like, I can't explain why we should go to that planet.

I'm being drawn there. And then she starts to talk about, well, maybe love is more scientific than we think. Maybe it's an artifact. Maybe it's a form of data that we can't figure out yet. Because I think we've all felt that.

It's like, whether it's intuition, whatever, like you're, you're drawn to something for reasons you can't articulate that may not be entirely rational. But maybe it's data on another plane of existence, in another universe, on a parallel universe. But maybe it's something we can't understand yet. And I think that's a really interesting question. Hmm.

And ultimately, they, they chose— they should have chose that because the other planet was data from the astronaut who was faking his data. Oh. So she was right. Her— the love that was driving her to visit the planet, the other planet, in an unscientific way of reasoning, she was correct. So she knew to trust that person.

That's right. And, you know, Matthew McConaughey kind of, like, opposes her because he's saying, look, you're a scientist. What the hell are you talking about? About. Like, this is a very unscientific point of view, you know.

Dustin Grinnell (01:50:21 --> 01:50:23)
It's like, gotcha.

Dustin Grinnell (01:50:23 --> 01:50:30)
I don't know. There is none. So, I'm just very interested in this. Is it a form of data?

Dan Coe (01:50:30 --> 01:51:56)
I mean, I'd love to believe that love is on some higher dimension. I think sometimes you just have to make tough choices. I mean, you know, whether you, you know, you love this person and you want to save them versus the experiment. I forget if it was Interstellar or some other movie where the dad is, you know, on the on the planet for a long time and he's like, you know, carrying out this experiment and the son finally comes to visit him and he's like, Dad, it's time to come home. And Dad's like, no, I gotta work on this experiment and, you know, I gotta learn this thing.

And I feel like a generation ago, you know, that would have been the hero. You know, the person who sacrifices everything in trying to obtain this scientific breakthrough. Result, or like whatever it was, you know, sacrificing your family. Whereas his son had a more balanced, you know, view of life and maybe more of a work-life balance, you know, that we all strive for. And he's like, all right, well, you've been working on this thing a long time, you've been away.

Dustin Grinnell (01:51:56 --> 01:52:37)
Yeah, and then the movie Interstellar explored that too. It was the best— they found that the best astronauts were people who had loved ones back home because they would fight to get home. They would have a more powerful survival instinct versus the, the early missions they sent out where astronauts who were kind of unattached, they didn't have families because they thought that would be more effective, you know. They wouldn't be kind of, quote unquote, burdened by, you know, people back home. They would take bigger risks and they would be detached. But it turns out— I mean, this is science fiction— but in that world, it turns out that just having someone who you loved made you want to get home. And we know that that's a survival instinct. Yeah.

Dan Coe (01:52:37 --> 01:52:46)
So we need to learn to love AI and have it love us back so that it doesn't take over the and fulfill the mission in the wrong way, I think. You go first.

Dustin Grinnell (01:52:46 --> 01:52:47)
You fall in love.

Dan Coe (01:52:47 --> 01:52:56)
See if your wife is okay with it. Yeah, I think, you know, there's a lot of concerns, but otherwise, she might be okay.

Dustin Grinnell (01:52:56 --> 01:53:18)
Well, one question I wanted to ask as we maybe wrap up, we're finishing up our meals here, is like, you know, you— I remember you said that astronomy helps us appreciate the long arc of history. So I was wondering if you can unpack that. You know, how does looking at the universe give us that perspective?

Dan Coe (01:53:18 --> 01:53:40)
Yeah, things have taken 13.8 billion years to get to this point, and I'm appreciative. I think it makes us feel small at times, but it also— we've accomplished so much. And yeah, progress seems painfully slow at times, but, you know, give it enough time and I'm hopeful that we'll figure it out.

Dustin Grinnell (01:53:41 --> 01:54:01)
You know, if, you know, you have Hubble, you have JWST, you have Roman coming, there's Euclid. So I'm curious, if you had a magic wand, what space telescope would you put up there right now? Like, what power, what capacity, And you know, yeah.

Dan Coe (01:54:01 --> 01:54:40)
Yeah, I mean, you know, the folks who are deciding those things are doing a great job coming up with all these proposals. If we had a magic wand and could build, you know, we would build a much bigger space telescope. I mean, you know, the bigger it is, the more distant things you can see and more clarity, and it could cover all wavelengths. So more than anything, if I had a magic wand, Magic Wand, I would want to travel faster than light, and I would want to just go. Where would you go? Where's the first place you'd go? First, you know, you go near home, you explore the other planets, you know, you see what those are like. Check out Saturn.

Dustin Grinnell (01:54:40 --> 01:54:48)
Oh yeah, see the big eye. See, go to Jupiter. And then, so then get out of the solar system and go to what, Alpha Centauri?

Dan Coe (01:54:48 --> 01:55:08)
Or yeah, see what planets are, uh, hanging out there and I mean, imagine, like, you know, there's a lot of times you see these— there's people discover other planets. I think there's thousands of them now, these exoplanets. And there might be some picture in the press, you know, that people have dramatized what they think it might look like. Yeah, yeah. Imagine we actually get to go and see another planet. But we—

Dustin Grinnell (01:55:08 --> 01:55:16)
I mean— It would be very obviously different conditions. We'd have to be— I mean, we'd have to have very sophisticated spacesuits and—

Dan Coe (01:55:16 --> 01:55:17)
No, I'm fine.

Dustin Grinnell (01:55:17 --> 01:55:19)
Oh, we're still on the magic wand.

Dan Coe (01:55:19 --> 01:56:12)
Yeah, the magic wand. So I'm going there. And then, yeah, see the other stars and the planets and everything. And then I would, you know, shake that magic wand a few more times so that I could go even faster and I could get up above the Milky Way and see what that looks like. Yeah, sure.

Because we have some ideas, you know, but you can't, you know, fully see what our own galaxy is. I mean, we've seen, you know, millions of other galaxies out there. We have a decent idea what ours looks like, but I just saw recently there's a new image that came out from Gaia, which has mapped the positions of, I think it's hundreds of millions of stars in our galaxy, and they— there's like a tilt to the Milky Way. There's like this bend like at the edges of the disk, you know, that I don't think people had realized before. How many spiral arms does it have?

Dustin Grinnell (01:56:12 --> 01:56:35)
Yeah, I'm gonna say something crazy. I wouldn't mind flying into a black hole. Yeah. I mean, I think it's like inevitable death. Mm-hmm. Maybe I'll do it at the end of my life, you know, so that I'd live a long, full life. But I think, doesn't the physics say we'd be sort of just stretched to an unimaginable way? We'd just be absolutely obliterated. But like, okay. What's going on in there?

Dan Coe (01:56:35 --> 01:56:58)
Oh yeah, you know, I mean, well, you first. Yeah, I think I know we can send something in there, or like, I mean, when I was a kid, one of the things I thought is like, oh, I want to be like the first person on Mars or whatever. And yeah, it'd be great to explore, but then you think about it and it's like, well, I mean, after a while, you know, it might be like, uh, you know, visiting, you know, some rocky desert or something.

Dustin Grinnell (01:56:58 --> 01:56:59)
It's cool, you know.

Dan Coe (01:56:59 --> 01:58:02)
Yeah, but after a while Well, you know, like, I definitely want to see it. But, you know, like, and so going into a black hole, you know, yeah, I mean, you'd almost certainly just be, you know, stretched out and killed long before you ever got, you know, into the middle of it. But yeah, like, if we have our magic wand and we kind of figure out, like, what— like, that's one of the biggest mysteries. I mean, this one talk I heard in astronomy conference, they said, Well, you know, what if every black hole creates a new universe? Right. I mean, they were talking about like the problem of like entropy, you know, needs to, you know, not increase. And that's one way to solve it. And like, so the multiverse is like each black hole is a new universe, and presumably our universe is from another black hole. And so can you go in there and explore the other universe. And, you know, are they all a bit different? I mean, our universe, you know, seems just right in a lot of ways for us.

Dustin Grinnell (01:58:02 --> 01:58:13)
Maybe there's others that are totally different. You once said only when it's dark can we see the stars. I think you meant that literally, but figuratively as well. Yeah, also. Yeah, what do you mean by that?

Dan Coe (01:58:13 --> 01:59:09)
We, you know, for JWST, we had to launch it a million miles We had a— there was a giant sunshield that blocked out the light and the heat from the sun and the Earth. And only when it's darkest could we see the most distant stars that we can see, you know, 13 billion years in the past. But also figuratively, I mean, it's only when it's darkest that we see what we're made of, you know. And we're made of stars, you know. So whenever you're, you know, feeling down about yourself or our place in the universe, you can realize that we shine super bright, you know, and that we are part of this whole 13.8 billion year story that we've built up over this whole time. And now we're able to actually do all these things and look back and figure out what we're made of. I mean, you know, that's what keeps me going every day.

Dustin Grinnell (01:59:09 --> 01:59:09)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:59:09 --> 01:59:32)
I like to ask, you know, all scientists about the scientific process and the role of failure in it. So, you know, science is often about failure, right? It's trial and error. It's learning from missteps and wrong turns. You've spoken about embracing failure as part of discovery, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that and share your perspective on it.

Dan Coe (01:59:32 --> 01:59:55)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, We've all heard famously that failure was not an option for going to the moon or for JWST. I mean, there's certain things that had to work. But then there's a lot of other things where it doesn't matter as much. If I find a distant galaxy and it turns out not to be so far away, that's interesting.

Dustin Grinnell (01:59:55 --> 01:59:59)
We're learning about something. Not a failure, just a redirection.

Dan Coe (01:59:59 --> 02:02:19)
I'll even mention, like, I was— I mentioned I was fortunate. I got to see one of the first JWST images, you know, before it was released. It was the Webb's first deep field. You see all these little dots in the image. And there's this one galaxy in particular that caught my eye that had these little dots in it.

And I thought, wow, it's like this burst of star formation in the early universe. And I called it a cosmic spring, you know, and you see, you know, it's like, you know, this birth in the early universe. We got our press team on it and they kind of wrote about all this. Turns out I was wrong. These were actually very old star clusters.

So when people actually analyzed it, you know, they found that they were billions of years old already, you know. This was, I think it was 9 billion years ago and they were already billions of years old, which kind of makes more sense. We weren't seeing biggest galaxy at this special time for all these— this is the burst of star formation. Although that could happen, but these were in place. So these are some of the earliest star clusters, and we've been seeing that further and further back in time.

When we look within our own galaxy, we see these old star clusters. You see some are young and some are old. See, some of them date back over 13 billion years. It's cluster of stars that, that formed so long ago, and it's just persisted to the present day. Well, now finally, with JWST, and especially combined with lensing, we're able to go back and see distant star clusters 13 billion years ago.

And, and we, we measured them, and we can tell they're already entrenched, and, and they're going to persist. So, you know, this is a huge route towards discovering the stars with JWST is that, you know, we're seeing some of the first star clusters, you know, it's not even the first galaxies, but the first star clusters, you know, we're getting down to individual stars in some cases. But yeah, I still like the name Cosmic Spring. I named my team after it. And, you know, and it also is sort of a nod to the scientific process that we get stuff wrong and we should be humble about it, you know, and that, you know, in the past there were, you know, There still are a lot of big egos sometimes wanting to get things right, but I kind of love embracing getting things wrong, 'cause that's when you learn, and that's fun.

Dustin Grinnell (02:02:19 --> 02:02:39)
But then you hear at the paradigm level is where maybe some scientists have trouble changing their minds. Isn't the famous quote about professors at academic institutions, they have to kind of die for the science to upgrade or evolve, they have to—

Dustin Grinnell (02:02:39 --> 02:02:39)
I don't know, I haven't heard that one.

Dustin Grinnell (02:02:39 --> 02:02:43)
You have to let go of a whole paradigm sometimes.

Dan Coe (02:02:43 --> 02:03:03)
I mean, that's true of a lot of things. We were talking about how things kind of move too slowly sometimes. I mean, I think it's like one of the 5 big personality traits is open-mindedness. Yeah. You know, and so, you know, I wonder if, you know, science sort of prefers Closed-minded? I don't— normally I don't think so.

Dustin Grinnell (02:03:03 --> 02:03:09)
It depends on the research. Wouldn't you say basic fundamental research, that would take a high degree of open-mindedness, don't you think?

Dan Coe (02:03:09 --> 02:04:27)
It's very curiosity-driven. Yeah, I think, and again, maybe it's an ego thing, I don't know, where people kind of, you know, they figure something out and they want it to be right. Whereas, you know, to me it seems, I don't know, be a bit more scientific to just, you know, go where the data takes you. And, you know, I mean, there's so much we don't know. And that was, you know, one of the most interesting things that we're studying is, you know, what is dark matter, dark energy? I mean, you know, we've kind of made up these things to, you know, quantify our ignorance. And so one of the very first results that came out from JWST was that there were a few galaxies that seemed to be impossibly big, like early in the universe. And this was, I think it was like a week or two after the first data started coming out. And then there were tons of headlines about how JWST broke the universe and these things were impossibly big and we must be on the cusp of figuring out like something to do with dark energy or the whole, you know, our whole understanding the beginning of the universe was broken. It turns out those galaxies just weren't really that massive. You know, we got better data and, you know, and some of them weren't that distant or so early in the universe after all.

Dustin Grinnell (02:04:27 --> 02:04:28)
You just got more accurate.

Dan Coe (02:04:28 --> 02:08:04)
And people realized like, oh, there's actually a supermassive black hole that's burning bright. And so we thought that was stellar mass, but it's actually this jet that, you know, that we, you know, it's kind of mistaken one thing for the other. But that took it takes a lot of the oxygen out of the whole conversation about, you know, what are we learning about the early universe. And it also just kind of is contrary to the whole scientific method where, you know, the reality is that, you know, science works, you know. Because I think it's dangerous actually when people start to think like, well, you know, these scientists say one thing one day and then something else the next day and they don't really know, so now we're not going to necessarily trust them when we say take certain medicine or whatever, you know.

So I think, you know, there's a lot we don't know, you know, and there's some things that we— there's a lot of things we can maybe, you know, get wrong sometimes, but there's a lot of things that we are confident about because that's, you know, the scientific method. And so, you know, the whole history of the universe, we've been measuring it, you know, more and more precisely spicy over the years. We don't know what dark matter and dark energy are, but we know basically that the universe has evolved along a certain timeline. And, you know, so for the most part, you know, you can't just— you don't just throw out all the old data because you got a shiny new telescope. I mean, all the old stuff still— we're building on the shoulders of giants.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just talk about how exciting scientific discovery can be. You know, we got these, these data, this galaxy that I discovered, you know, 10 years earlier, and we were finally seeing it for the first time. And my student Tegger Shaw was giving a talk at the American Astronomical Society conference like the next day. We're getting our data on a Sunday and he's got a talk scheduled for Monday.

And we were fortunate the data were coming in. And normally I say, you know, we shouldn't work on the weekends or, you know, after hours, but sometimes, you know, you get super excited and you just want to dive in. And, you know, this was one of those times. And so we got the data, our colleague Gabe Brammer reduced it really quickly, and he sent it to us, and it was like, all right, we got your spectrum, but we don't see any lines that tell us about the elements. You know, and at first glance that seemed about right, but my colleague Rebecca Larson, she's a very experienced spectroscopist, she was like, "I know there's lines there," you know, but we were busy, there was like, you know, people milling about and we were about to go out for dinner and, you know, drinks or whatever, so, you know, we put it aside, you know, later that night she goes back to it and she cracks it, you know, like she had to try a bunch of different things but eventually Eventually she's like, "Here you go.

You've got hydrogen, you've got carbon, you've got oxygen, you've got neon." And, you know, so she sent it around. We gave it to Tiger. He quickly incorporated it into his talk that he was giving the next day. We were scrambling a bit, but he gave it. It was a great talk, you know.

The people were excited to see it. And I told him, I was like, "It's never going to get more exciting than this." I mean, this is This is, you know, as good as it could get. You know, we're getting these great data, we're racing to put it in. You know, it's just that thrill of, you know, seeing something for the first time that you're learning about it and, you know, you want to share it, you know, quickly with everybody. But for a brief moment, like, you're the only people that know, you know, this fact about the universe or about this little corner of it.

Dustin Grinnell (02:08:04 --> 02:08:05)
Yeah, you're right.

Dustin Grinnell (02:08:05 --> 02:08:16)
It probably will never go as fast like that again. You get the data, you interpret it, analyze it, it's a good finding, and then you present it to your scientific colleagues.

Dan Coe (02:08:16 --> 02:08:32)
And a lot of times that's kind of painfully slow too. I mean, we're very meticulous about making sure that we get things right, we write the paper, and it kind of takes a while. And yeah, but every once in a while, you know, some things are just kind of really clear and you can get them out there quick.

Dustin Grinnell (02:08:32 --> 02:08:38)
Yeah. What does it mean— so you can look 90% of the way back to the beginning. 13.5.

Dustin Grinnell (02:08:39 --> 02:08:40)
Yeah, 98-ish.

Dustin Grinnell (02:08:40 --> 02:08:49)
So, 90, sorry, 98, yeah. What's 100 mean? Like, what's that mean? And then what does it mean to go beyond that? Like, are we just looking at a dot? Are we looking at nothingness?

Dan Coe (02:08:49 --> 02:09:05)
Do we look back and see ourselves? Or does it fold in? So yeah, that's right. It's a really interesting question. So we, you know, we'll be able to Push that back maybe to 99%. At some point we'll run out of galaxies and stars.

Dustin Grinnell (02:09:05 --> 02:09:08)
Right, so then it'll just be dark. Right.

Dan Coe (02:09:08 --> 02:09:25)
Okay. So then, you know, what if you could wave your magic wand and you could have like the biggest telescope you could possibly imagine, it's as big as the Milky Way, and you could really just, you know, see everything there is to see. Well, I mean, at some point the age of the universe is what it is, and— Right, it's fine then.

Dustin Grinnell (02:09:25 --> 02:09:27)
Do you see the Big Bang?

Dan Coe (02:09:27 --> 02:09:59)
That's what I'm saying. Well, so there's no more stars. Oh. But there's— and for a while there's just no light. There's an explosion. Right, so, but then there's the cosmic microwave background as this time where— Yeah, I've seen that image. Yeah, so in the very beginning, there was all these particles whizzing around. You got your protons, electrons, and photons, particles of light. You know, and then some neutrinos and other things, but let's focus on those three. So the protons and electrons want to get together and form atoms. Okay.

Dustin Grinnell (02:09:59 --> 02:10:03)
But there's all these photons zipping around. Sorry, this is after the Big Bang happens? Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (02:10:03 --> 02:10:03)
Or—

Dan Coe (02:10:03 --> 02:11:29)
Okay. We got our protons and our electrons, they want to attract and form an atom. Got it. Every time they form an atom, photon comes along and knocks them apart. And they keep forming, it keeps, you know, knocking them apart.

They just can't get together. For the life of them. So finally, the universe is expanding and it cools to the point where now you're about 300,000 years in, and now as the universe cools, the photons are light waves and they're being stretched into the redder part of the spectrum. That's how we also— that's how come we also have to build an infrared telescope, because this light is all being stretched out to redder wavelengths. The redshifts.

Yeah. So it's also just kind of— it's losing energy. And so after 300,000 years, these photons aren't knocking the atoms apart anymore. They'll knock into it and they don't have enough energy. So now you get married.

Yeah. So now finally the protons and electrons were able to get together and the photons quit blocking them. And now the light all kind of streams free over a relatively short time. And that's what we see imprinted on this cosmic microwave background. So we're seeing these photons, some of them are from these regions where it's maybe a little bit more dense, or some where it's a little bit less dense, and we're actually able to see that, those sort of ripples, those spots that we see are from that.

Dustin Grinnell (02:11:29 --> 02:11:31)
300,000 years? Yeah.

Dan Coe (02:11:31 --> 02:12:02)
Okay. So you say, well, how could you see before that. Which, by the way, you know, already being able to see that early is phenomenal. To see anything in between that, you know, would be amazing. But now you say, well, can you see past that veil? In order to do that, you might need something like neutrinos, which do pass through all of that. And now you're talking about like a neutrino telescope, but the neutrinos would go right through it and so what would we even see? I mean, I don't know, this is getting—

Dustin Grinnell (02:12:02 --> 02:12:04)
So maybe we just need a new kind of telescope.

Dan Coe (02:12:04 --> 02:12:19)
I mean, we're, yeah, we're way, we're so far, you know, before the point where we can even think about, you know, we need a huge telescope and, you know, we're still at the point we're trying to see the first stars, much less beyond the veil of the CMB.

Dustin Grinnell (02:12:19 --> 02:12:28)
But so you're saying maybe not with JWST do we get to the point of of it all, the origin of the universe? I hope so.

Dan Coe (02:12:28 --> 02:13:08)
The singularity, so to speak? Yeah, I mean, and I, you know, that's about as much as I've thought of that. Maybe other people have thought about it more, but in principle, can you see back further? I mean, I want to believe, you know, that we'll figure out someday where we all came from. Or maybe we won't, you know. And it's like, I think you even had in your story how there's this scientist who's been working on this stuff for all these years and they don't quite figure it out and they're wondering if it all, you know, was worthwhile. You know, I sure think so. That, you know, because we're learning all these interesting things along the way.

Dustin Grinnell (02:13:08 --> 02:13:13)
Yeah, it's not like it's time wasted. Yeah. Some really exciting things happening. Yeah.

Dan Coe (02:13:14 --> 02:13:55)
As you work. Right. It's like, you know, my student talks about, you know, so what do you want to work on? Well, finding the first galaxies. It's like, well, yeah, you know. Yeah. And it's hard. It's like saying you want to win the Nobel Prize or something. I mean, it's hard to kind of set out and do that. Although, you know, you can certainly build things to try to find first galaxies, but there's a lot of luck involved in that, and it might not happen. So you should build something where you have a a chance of finding that, and this helps you write a good proposal too, by the way. You have a good chance of, you know, you have some chance of maybe doing something spectacular, but you're also definitely gonna do a lot of great things with your science along the way.

Dustin Grinnell (02:13:55 --> 02:14:26)
Do you think that, you know, guys like me from the media, journalists, like, we tend to focus on holy grails. We tend to focus on magic bullets. But it's, you know, science is a little bit more granular. It's like less dramatic, you know? It's smaller questions. It's incremental progress, you know? It's not like what happens after the Big— before the Big Bang. It's like, let's find the next star. Let's—

Dan Coe (02:14:26 --> 02:15:09)
Yeah, a lot of times it's that way. But it's also, you know, you're getting a lot of pretty pictures. Interesting results and, you know, some of those details about some corner of the universe can be really interesting. I mean, not everything changes our fundamental understanding of everything. And, you know, but there is that desire and that hope that especially, you know, when folks are writing about it or, you know, asking me about it, they'll say, "Yeah, but didn't those galaxies break the universe?" And I say, "Well, no, sorry." I mean, you know, there's other interesting things that aren't that interesting, but, uh, we always want to dramatize it a bit more. It's like being a tourist. Hopefully there's interesting things you can see along the way. For sure.

Dustin Grinnell (02:15:09 --> 02:15:41)
It's, it's possible that, uh, early junior scientists may be listening to this. Um, uh, people may be even thinking, should they get into science, like a high school student or something. People may be thinking about leaving science, uh, especially in the current climate, what advice do you have to young scientists and people thinking about science? You clearly are in the right spot, you clearly enjoy and are satisfied and fulfilled by your work. What do you, what advice do you give to junior people?

Dan Coe (02:15:41 --> 02:19:03)
I used to say you go to grad school next. Sometimes now there's like a post-bac. You might do a year in between to build even more experience. After, you know, grad school might be, I don't know, 5 years. Then you you do some postdocs, maybe 3 years each, you do 2 of those, and then maybe you get a job somewhere if you're lucky.

In your mid-40s. Yeah, right, and so, you know, some people might not want to go that route. You might want to do something else. I will say that along the way is some of the most fun and interesting times, you know, where you just get to focus on science, and sometimes I reminisce and kind of wish I could go back to those days where you're just just focus on science. And of course, I have, you know, more responsibilities now, which is good in a different way.

But, um, yeah, it's a, it's a long road, but, um, you know, if you're enjoying it along the way, uh, it's great. And there's also a lot of things you can do, like if you get your degree or if you go to grad school and you do it, and then you can always decide you want to go do something else. And the skills that you build doing this kind of thing are sought after in a lot of industries. So you decide to do this for a while and go do something else. When I think, you know, in a lot of industries, you know, there isn't the same idea of working at one place for your whole career, you know, for better or worse, you know.

You might do it while you're enjoying it, and then, you know, you can go do something else. You know, the other thing I'll say is people used to say that, well, I'm not good at math and So I can't do your job. And I said, well, I don't do a lot of math. There's other people who have worked out a lot of the more detailed equations, and I've done that kind of thing in the past. But nowadays I don't do a lot of math.

I do do a lot of coding. So that's a useful tool to have. But I will say that nowadays I think we won't need to code for much longer. I mean, I think AI has gotten really good at It's probably about halfway there. I mean, I use it a lot to help out either writing from scratch or helping as I go.

So I wonder now with my current students, you know, obviously it's useful to know how to code and to go to the telescope and to learn, you know, all these things and what they entail and get that appreciation for it. But I also wonder if like in a few years if students won't need to code because we kind of expect it nowadays. We're like, well, you need to code in order to do astronomy. But that hasn't always been the case. I mean, you go back 50 years or 100 years, you know, astronomy is all about observing, problem-solving, critical thinking, you know.

Dustin Grinnell (02:19:04 --> 02:19:36)
So yeah, I've heard of— have you thought about like gamification of science? I've heard of like some scientists like release released some protein folding data on the internet, and they basically invited the public to play. And they— so they turned, uh, complicated science into a game almost. I wonder if you could, like, gamify some of the analysis that could— that's going to go on on some of these images. Yeah, just release it and let people treat it like a hobby, like a sport.

Dan Coe (02:19:36 --> 02:20:55)
So people have gone through and looked at little stamps of images from large surveys, and they see a galaxy and they were asked to classify it in some certain way. And there's been so many iterations of this now, I haven't really kept up. But the public is absolutely— and they've discovered things. Green peas were a type of galaxy that we didn't know about before, and it's this really compact galaxy that's going through an intense burst of star formation, so intense that it's lighting up oxygen doubly ionized. So in terms of like energizing the electrons and then ionizing them, and that's like the main thing you see is just like this one wavelength, and it's green, and that's it, like 5,000 angstroms.

And that's, you know, the whole galaxy. It's this really compact thing. And that was, you know, found by people just going through these large large images because there aren't that many of them. But they are there, you know, every once in a while. And so it took a lot of people looking a lot to find them.

Dustin Grinnell (02:20:55 --> 02:21:18)
Yeah, like you could do anything everything with your life and you're asking fundamental questions about the nature of reality, the origins of our universe, the origins of life. Like, why? Is it that just the way you're put together? Are you inquisitive? Is it a temperament? Yeah. You seem like you're just locked in. Like, this is what you should be doing and you're doing it, you know?

Dan Coe (02:21:18 --> 02:22:09)
Yeah, I'm very fortunate that way. Thanks. But we are all scientists. We're all exploring the world curiously. I think we all hypothesize and we test things out and we learn about the world. And yeah, I love it so much that I made a whole career out of it. And I want to understand how the world works and explain it to people. So I think most people in probably most jobs I would love to have some of this where they kind of explore things and figure it out. But yeah, I do love just contributing to our knowledge and discovering things. And it's a lot of fun. I mean, it's not for everybody. I mean, people do all sorts of interesting things. But if you're excited about this, you can have a go at it.

Dustin Grinnell (02:22:09 --> 02:22:50)
Actually, I always wondered about this. There's theoretical physicists, theoretical physicists. Technical scientist, you're like, I guess, doing a lot of math, you're calculating. You're not doing what you're doing, which is looking at imagery. You know, you're capturing images and that the— that are— that our eyes can see and be delighted by and can analyze. You know, you're obviously doing a lot of theory in the background. Yes, of course. But like, did you ever have like a— if you want be a theory scientist versus like a— I don't know, I think of astronomers as people who, you know, you look and see. You're not cracking equations on a notepad, so to speak, all day.

Dan Coe (02:22:50 --> 02:24:41)
And, you know, when I was a grad student, I was, you know, I think my thesis was about, you know, towards an understanding of dark matter. I was using this gravitational lensing effect to map out the dark matter in the galaxy cluster, which is pretty cool to be able to see this hidden part of the universe. Now I use it to magnify the distant universe and study these, these distant galaxies with, yeah, with JWST. But one analogy I've thought of is, you know, the show Scrubs and they have the surgeons and the doctors and they kind of, you know, talk about they're the jocks and the geeks kind of thing. Yeah.

I don't normally think about myself as a jock, but in this case, you know, I kind of feel like I'm going out there, I'm getting the data, you know, and then, you know, somebody smart is going to help me explain what's in there, you know, some theorist. And yeah, I mean, I think, you know, we all, you know, specialize, you know, so much on like each part of our job. You know, I've gotten good at designing observations and writing proposals and, you know, discovering things, you know, and then other people are good at other parts. And, you know, even with the stuff that I look at, you know, distant galaxies, and then I have so many other colleagues who, you know, can explain, you know, help explain the spectra to me or the stars. I have other colleagues who say, "What are you studying galaxies for?

Dustin Grinnell (02:24:41 --> 02:25:16)
But another way you contribute is by communicating scientific research. You've been in the media, and you'll— I've seen your, your interviews online and, uh, you know, TV, radio, podcasts. Um, you know, it's a— it's one thing to just talk to the scientific community, it's another thing to make your science accessible to the public in order to like increase awareness about certain things. And, uh, you know, you're, you're doing that too. Um, yeah. What do you think about science communication and popularization.

Dan Coe (02:25:16 --> 02:25:54)
This part is really fun. I mean, it's one of the parts I love most. And thanks. I've gotten to do a bit of it. I think I do a decent job. There's other folks who do even better. There's Dr. Becky Smethurst and Ethan Siegel, I think, are two of the astronomers doing some of the best reporting, because they are astronomers, and so they're in it, and then they're also communicating it with everybody else on YouTube or in articles. So, and I turn to them when I'm trying to understand some of the latest news or things that have come out. But, you know, happy to do it from— I love doing it from time to time when I get a chance.

Dustin Grinnell (02:25:54 --> 02:26:26)
And no, it's a lot of fun. Yeah. Well, I am at the end of my questions. We're at the end of our meal. You know, this has just been pretty much a fascinating Good morning. I can't tell you how thankful I am that you invited me into your work and you, you know, gave me time to talk about this. You're a super interesting guy and super kind guy, and I just love your attitude, and I just, I can't say thank you enough.

Dan Coe (02:26:26 --> 02:26:33)
That's very kind. I appreciate that. It's been really great talking to you. Thank you for inviting me, and I hope everybody Enjoy this.

Dustin Grinnell (02:26:34 --> 02:26:37)
Yeah, thanks. Thanks for listening to this episode of Curiously.

Dustin Grinnell (02:26:37 --> 02:26:51)
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with astronomer Dan Coe. If this episode challenged you or helped expand your perspective or satisfy your curiosity about the world, please consider sharing it with your friends and family and use it to have a conversation of your own.

Dustin Grinnell (02:26:51 --> 02:26:58)
If you want to support Curiously, please consider leaving a review. They encourage people to listen and help attract great guests.

Dustin Grinnell (02:26:58 --> 02:27:02)
Thanks again for listening, and stay tuned for more conversations with people I meet along the way.