Intro

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David Kipping studies exoplanets and the search for life beyond Earth, but he's grounded about what we actually know versus what we hope for. He's spent his career looking for moons around distant planets, while most astronomers thought it was a waste of time.

In this conversation, we unpack why finding microbial life on Mars would actually create more questions than answers, how the "doomsday argument" suggests humanity has less time than we think, and why competition might be both the driver of technological progress and the cause of our extinction.

00:00 Introduction
03:14 How rogue planets drift through darkness
06:09 Earth's billion-year countdown to doom
09:46 Why bigger stars blow our minds
12:21 What came before the Big Bang?
16:43 The haunting question: why does anything exist?
21:06 Life appeared fast but we can't recreate it
26:13 Could aliens hide under Jupiter's moons?
29:14 How we actually detect distant planets
34:20 The challenge of confirming alien life
39:46 The Fermi Paradox gets worse with Mars life
44:18 Accelerating toward our own extinction
50:45 Our obsession with the present over survival
56:26 What a trillion-dollar NASA could achieve
1:00:12 Ancient civilisations on Earth before us?
1:04:38 Why space hoaxes thrive
1:13:26 Debating alien spacecraft theories
1:22:38 Could we nuke a comet to survive?
1:27:28 Mars versus Moon colonisation
1:30:07 Sci-fi that gets the science right
1:38:06 How talking science improves research
1:42:21 What David wants to be remembered for
1:44:21 What finding aliens would really look like

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