Are We Alone In The Universe? Sara Seager on Exoplanets, Venus, and the Hunt for Alien Life (Astrophysicist and Planetary Scientist at MIT)

Speaker A: My favorite planet is always the next one, because no matter how comfortable we get with the craziness that exoplanets are, there's always something even more incredible just waiting to be found. When people found the first exoplanets, nature was kind. Nature gave us easy-to-find planets. Like, if we had been left with all those solar system copies alone, we might not even be talking right now. Speaker B: We have our own set of recipes for life on Earth, and some other species or civilization on another planet has these different set of recipes, and they could conflict so aggressively that you could effectively wipe each other out.

Speaker A: There's just so much more out there, and We have evidence for hundreds of billions of galaxies out there. So if you just think about that for a moment, it's absolutely overwhelming. Speaker C: Hey, I'm Mario, and this is The Generalist Podcast. You've probably heard the saying, "The future's already here, it's just not evenly distributed." On this show, we explore that future through conversations with the founders, investors, and thinkers who are already living in it. Helping you see it more clearly and capitalize on what's next. Today's episode is especially futuristic.

I'm speaking with Professor Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at MIT and one of the world's leading experts on exoplanets, planets that orbit stars other than our own sun. As well as teaching at MIT, Sara is a MacArthur Genius awardee. She's responsible for changing how we search for life beyond Earth pioneering techniques to detect atmospheric signals from planets hundreds of light-years away. In our conversation, we discuss the revolutionary hunt for extraterrestrial life forms, including how Sarah's team may have detected signs of life on Venus, Sarah's investment portfolio approach to research and how she balances a mix of high-risk and low-risk bets, and finally, the future of interstellar exploration.