few questions are as universal as are we alone and if our Celestial neighbors are out there who are they where are they and should we fear them these questions are just the tip of the iceberg and just a few of the questions I got to explore with astrophysicist John Mather who is also the senior project scientist on the James Webb Space Telescope plus the first NASA scientist to win a Nobel Prize in this video we get to explore the mystifying secrets of space where Jon takes us back billions of years to a time before the Big Bang and also catapults us many moons into the future one where evidence of our universe's origin may actually no longer exist if you were to come back and another say 100 billion years most of the galaxies that we know about would have receded from us so far away that we couldn't see them anymore so the university will be in the process of appearing to empty itself out and if you imagine going far enough into the future with just one Milky Way left all the other galaxies are gone the evidence of the history of the universe might have disappeared so I'd like to invite you on this Cosmic Journey as we venture through wormholes quantum entanglement dark matter and dark energy and the abyss of unanswered questions that scientists like John are trying to answer through technology as a reminder the content here is for informational purposes only should not be taken as legal business tax or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any ACC fund for more details please see a160z.com disclosures why don't we actually kind of look at some of these images from James Webb and maybe you could just speak to okay maybe even is there one that really you think shows us new features of understanding so we have something that Joe Biden released at the White House on July 11th last year and it shows uh right quite a few remarkable things there's some stars with six legs sticking out and that's just due to the wave nature of light because light sort of bends around the hexagonal edges of our mirrors uh so we but we knew about that so stars are not that exciting right now uh then in the middle of the picture are some giant fuzzy galaxies enormously massive and we sort of knew they were there already and so that wasn't so exciting but we wanted to know exactly how massive and exactly where all that stuff is and then uh in the background our little pink arcs um curved things that do not look like galaxies but they really are and so they are highly magnified and distorted images of very very distant objects and nature has given given us lenses extra lenses in space to magnify uh the more distant universe and this is something that Einstein predicted and we never thought it would be useful uh except in the most abstract way but so now what we see is sometimes two or three or four or five images of the same distant object all stretched out and magnified so this is a way to look farther back in time to see the details of the various first galaxies so that's the coolest thing for the astronomer in that picture um so sometimes we even see that the early Galaxy is filled up with a little sparkly things we call them globular clusters of like a hundred thousand stars uh that were presumably formed together and now our big question is well which came first galaxies or globular clusters did the universe make the little clusters first and then they joined together or did the Galaxy form first and then break up into little clusters so this is one of our generic questions of which came first chickens or eggs or breadfruit I don't know so by the which brings me to another question about early galaxies there's a black hole a giant black hole in every Galaxy just about yes and so we know they're there because we see things orbiting around them so we calculate that there's something unanimously massive object in the middle sometimes they're very bright because material is falling in and getting compressed to enormous temperatures and we can see that part and now we want to know well which came first the Galaxy or the black hole uh did this universe start off with black holes all over the place or did it uh make galaxies first and then they made they got black holes so we've begun to observe black holes out there we've been even seen a few years ago black holes colliding with each other and joining together to make bigger black holes this is with the James Webb or that was done with the ligo observatory which is here on the ground uh and uh We've even even more remarkably seen neutron stars colliding and making a bigger neutron star and that has its own story to tell because for instance when you look at your ring if you have a wedding ring of gold then we know that most of the gold in that wedding ring came from neutron stars that collided and and blew up and material came back out into spaces and was recycled so this is a part of the most astonishing story about our own Origins that were made out of not only recycled stars but neutron stars that collided and blew up and so our own personal story is got the most remarkable threads in it and I just want to ask you about this particular image which has been referenced a lot in terms of understanding exoplanets and the composition of them and perhaps you could speak to maybe what we've learned there and also what it may indicate in terms of life that we have maybe come across not come across I think the answer is the latter but also what that maybe opens up for the future yeah sure so yeah everybody wants to know are we alone yes and uh if we're not alone where are the neighbors so I'll give you my I'll jump ahead to that but I think the answer is I think the answer is no we're not alone and I think life will occur quite frequently but it will mostly be rather Elementary and when you look at the history of Earth you see the history of the different forms of life growing it's taken all of the entire history of the universe for us to turn up so that does tell us that we're kind of rare in history so probably life is everywhere that it could be which is perhaps in conditions like ours where it's there's liquid water at about the right temperature so but probably we're not going to find the neighbors similarly that we're not in danger from the neighbors so maybe we got lots of unexplained things here on planet Earth but it's not very likely to be space aliens yeah something else that we don't understand instead so um so what are we going to do about measuring well of course here in the solar system we're sending out probes to land on Mars and visit other places where there could be life and see so on Mars we're working to bring back little rocks that have the chance of having fossils in them so that's really hard but we're working on it we're already putting the rocks in little caches to get ready to bring them home yeah yeah we are sending probes out to orbit around satellites of Jupiter and Saturn where um water is coming out there are places where there there's a liquid water ocean covered with ice and there are cracks in the ice and the water comes out and you can see something and so if we're lucky we might find out there are organic molecules in those oceans I would say maybe there's life under there and and so it gives us impetus to track it down and find out more um so then we get to what can we do about other planets around other stars can we find places that are like home little Earth's orbiting stars like the sun so far we don't know of any like that because it's a really hard observational problem what we're doing at the web we are looking at planets orbiting other smaller stars that are called M Stars so these are very weak little stars are hardly as big as Jupiter but they're warm enough hardly as big as Jupiter it's just funny with our sizes as a matter of scale yeah Earth is 8 000 miles across uh Jupiter's 88 000 miles across and the Sun is about a million miles across that's good for you good reference roughly each one is ten times bigger than the other so um so yes we're able to study our planets around small stars because if some of the time the little planet will go in front of the star it'll block some Starlight so okay now we know it's there uh we can calculate its temperature and its size and whether it possibly host an ocean okay now does it have an atmosphere so yes maybe uh so look to see if any of The Starlights going through the atmosphere of the planet on its way to the telescope and um yeah we can do this and we have a pretty large catalog of large planets that do have an atmosphere with interesting molecules in them and so the technique works and now we're just now busy analyzing the small stars that have potentially small Earth-like planets and I can't say that we're really surprised but so far the little ones do not have atmospheres that we can tell so we shouldn't be too disappointed because we didn't really expect it but we still do really want to know yeah so what's what's next in this subject well we need to build different telescopes um tell me more about finishing up one now called the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and it will have an equipment to look for planets as direct images a device called a coronagraph so if we can get that to work you never know we might see some signs of more or less Earth-like planet and the next one we're going to build is called habitable worlds Observatory and so when we do that we'll be able to see an image with a little dot next to the other Big Dot and it'll be an Earth-like object around a star like the sun which is a much more likely place to find signs of life because of course we've got one observation which is US yeah here we are so please look for another place like us so we're building that or I should say we will be building that because that's what NASA wants to build the Congress wants to build it uh National Academy of Sciences said to build it astronomers want us to build it and I think the public wants us to build this because oh I sure want to know they all want to know are we alone we want to know I mean let me ask you a tangential question which is just there's just still so many question marks about this universe around us um is there a specific question mark that you know you would just love to see solved in your lifetime you would love that answer just even out of personal interest there's something gnawing at you I guess the the ones that are obvious that already are recognized by thousands of scientists Cosmic Dark Energy Cosmic dark matter they seem to be there that we can describe them mathematically they seem to fit practically everything that we know and we did not expect them there was no sort of basic understanding of anything that said they should be there maybe just for the listeners could you explain what both of those are dark energy and dark matter so Cosmic Dark Matter appears to be um transparent we shouldn't call it dark we should call it transparent there's a lot more of it than there is of ordinary matter the protons and neutrons and atoms that you all see every day um so it's out there it has been detected by its gravity so back in the 1930s we already had a hint that galaxies were spinning too fast which means they're being held together by more gravity than you can find cannot find the Stars to explain that amount of gravity so something something is weird so it took from then until about 1980 something before we had a lot more evidence and we could say yeah there's really there um how do we know what it is no we have been hunting in Laboratories for decades and darn it there isn't a single thing that's ever said this is a good promising candidate so that means it's a wide open mystery then we have the cosmic Dark Energy you know which is something that in principle Einstein imagined uh he there's a place in his equations of the universe that could be called dark energy uh but we thought uh generally astronomers thought that well that would never happen so we imagined and believed that the Universe expansion will be slowing down because gravity will pull is pulling on things and to slow the expansion which seems to be true up for the first roughly 10 billion years of the expanded universe or 9 billion and then it seems to be accelerating so who asked for that well it was discovered by people who are planning to measure the deceleration and there's something around here so they got a Nobel Prize for discovering the acceleration it's going faster and faster every year which means that if you were to come back in another say 100 billion years most of the galaxies that we know about would have receded from us so far away that we couldn't see them anymore so the university will be in the process of appearing to empty itself out and if you imagine going far enough into the future with just one Milky Way left all the other galaxies are gone the evidence of the history of the universe might have disappeared from oh that's fascinating just to confirm that you're saying it still exists it would just be so far away yeah too far away to see it wow so so anyway we are here at this particularly interesting time where we still have evidence and control write the story and tell us ourselves how did we get here from something what comes before the Big Bang that's kind of like what are at least my brain was coming to as well right there's there is the big bang and then you have all of this matter expanding creating galaxies Etc but like I don't it's hard for me to wrap my brain around this idea of what comes before it yeah well maybe that's because maybe there isn't anything for it so the way I think out about it is uh so from the observer's perspective because what we see today is distant galaxies running away from us and we see the cosmic microwave radiation that tells us what it was like when it was young and when you imagine running it backwards in our minds yes so like a play button literally like run the play button backwards so the galaxies go crushing together the the stars are ripped apart the temperature goes up and up eventually the atoms are ripped apart even the protons and neutrons are ripped apart and separated into quarks and then we picture this uh soup of quarks and uh and leptons they're called and then we say well what came before that and so we have guest we have a guess that there's something called a inflation field a purely conceptual quantum mechanical idea and we say if this could happen in this particular way then it would produce the expanding universe that we have today and so it seems to hold up in the sense that there are a few predictions that it makes that we verified by observation of the cosmic background radiation so I when this was first proposed I thought oh that'll that'll never work we'd never know but there is a little bit of evidence that this Cosmic inflation story could be correct uh so but it's still pretty much of a guess so then you say well what could come before that and what does the theory predict so the theory predicts maybe there could be other universes um erupting out of this inflation field and we would never know they were existing um there could be billions or trillions or an infinite number of other universes according to this idea and we'd never know but because this is so much of a guess we honestly can't tell you what came before that yeah and then we get to what about quantum gravity which we touched on very briefly um if quantum mechanics should apply to space and time themselves then um what happens if time and space don't mean what they seem to mean anymore and then all kind of all bets are offsets we are completely confused we have no successful theoretical predictions based on that idea of quantum gravity doesn't mean there isn't any but we then it gets into all the wonderful questions about wormholes and and quantum entanglement and the other mysteries of modern science and engineering oh boy my uh Cosmic dust brain is that yeah my Cosmic dust brain is not able to do that either but somebody will be working on it and some people are working on it and uh we might get some breakthroughs they CNC podcast what we're trying to do here we provide an informed clear-eyed but all but also Mystic View in its future and we're trying to do that by featuring some of the most inspiring people and the things they're building and so if you believe in that and you'd like to join us on this journey make sure to click subscribe but also let us know in the comments below what you'd like to see us cover next thank you so much for listening and we will see you next time