For AI to work for everyone and the larger living world, we need it to speak the language of the planetary systems to which we're all embedded.It must understand our infrastructure and human activity, but also the impacts
And I I think there's something deeper going on here. Planetary intelligence doesn't just change what we do, but it changes how we know the worldand our place within it.
And we'll have to figure out how to address that in a healthy way. Planetary protection. How do we protect space from being contaminated by Earth life?What do we do about the potential for war, whether that's conflicts between communities that are living in space or between settlements in space
We did 22 precursor missions to the moon. Planetary scientists at that time, when they looked at the moon-- because we'd never been there before-- were seeing all these impact areas that actually theythought were caldera. When they looked at the moon they thought, oh, how look at how volcanic it is.
I'm a physicist, not a cartoonist. Planetary civilization controls planetary energy.
And so we have lots of data through our asteroid search. Planetary Resources, a mining company, wants to exploit the resources of asteroids, had a Kickstarter campaign, raisedalmost $2 million. And because they raised so much, they announced they were going to be able to do an Asteroid Zoo.
The overriding thing in our discussion-- our end user was Grandma. Planetary scientists, much like terrestrial geologists, kind of usually pick a spot, and they say, here's my study area.
like hunger and disease but bigger calamities that could happen to this planet, how are we not to say that we're not here to protect the planet by inventing things against bigger planetary things like meteoroids or Tom Shadyac: Yeah, let me ask you a question was there, by the way I'm supposed to repeatthis for the internet, the question was, what's the meaning of life Tom Shadyac: It was a big question cause you said a lot of things that are profound that I can and may respond to but may not
in the sense that it includes everything from microbiology, geo-microbiology, chemistry, planetary science, geology, all the way to cosmology. And it, none of those are themselvesnecessarily astrobiology. But there has been a real instinct in, in and an organized effort
Paleontologists, who dig up old dead stuff. And planetary scientists, who explore the geology of other worlds. Although, sometimes, geology is all about rocks!
difficult, bordering on impossible with current technology. It's not totally impossible and there are a few dozen special planetary systems that have been directly imaged in this way. But that's only a few dozen out of the 5,500 known exoplanets. Most of our knowledge
But what's interesting about that is this has implications for what's called planetary protection, which means we have to look and trace as best we can, is there any molecules that we're really planetary genomics. In particular, we just published work showing that there's a framework to characterize all the organisms that might be able to survive the trip
But can you explain the framework that you use for thinking about the climate impact. These planetary boundaries is the term you use. Yeah. So the planetary boundaries are really the thing that kind of informed how this diet came about.
But the investments and the encouragements and the activities that we've done to those companies-- for instance, like SpaceX, Blue Origin-- that now have rockets that can get up Because Planetary Science requires windows.
just out of grad school in their 20s and 30s, who got this idea that after Voyager made it to Neptune, which was the last of the sort of previous era of planetary exploration. After that in 1989, you know, what was next? We had had our first flybys of all the classically known planets except for Pluto.
impossible boundary conditions. I know when we won it, we won it against the Goliath of planetary exploration. Our team wanted against JPL, Jet Propulsion Lab at Cal Tech, who had been first to every planet in the solar system. We wrote the better proposal, we marketed it better, we did have the better team.
of the solar system, and Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and maybe Pluto in the outer part of the solar system, that was established dogma, that that's how planetary systems are. And in fact, you could have had someone like me, even though Google wasn't here 20 years ago here in this location.
That's the sample that's going to allow us to calculate the fraction of stars in our galaxy that host small, potentially habitable planets. of planetary systems are an order of magnitude smaller than for the Earth-sized planets.
The Planetary Lake Lander is funded by the NASA Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets.
The overriding thing in our discussion-- our end user was Grandma. The planetary scientists aren't even thinking about it.
Because the problems that these institutions were built to address are only intensifying. But I believe that planetary intelligence can help us transform our institutions. Purpose-built for the speed and the complexity of the 21st century.
And like planetary motion.
And then the planetary body slam into each other.
or cognition across a planetary scale.
recreated the conditions of planetary formation, and used computer models to simulate planetary collisions.
Moogega is the planetary protection lead of the famed NASA 2020 Mars mission, with its highly viewed landing on February 18 of 2021.
So I am a planetary protection engineer, and so my job is twofold.
And by being a planetary protection engineer, being that guardian of the galaxy, it's my job to make sure that the science we do as we explore
And it was a collaboration from "The Lancet" and the EAT foundation, which is a non-profit organization run in Sweden. And essentially what the Planetary Health Diet attempted to do-- or did-- was to sit down and say, OK, how can we have a diet that would be applicable to everyone in the world that would both be healthy for people-- so it would make recommendations of food that would stop
But over time, science has moved in a direction where there's more of an understanding of the various nutritional needs and the separation between weight and health. How does the planetary health diet approach providing recommendations that are applicable to this sort of global variety of healthy bodies? Absolutely. It's really interesting, actually.
But what I'd say is although there's a huge variety of people in the world, there's also a huge variety of cuisines and food cultures. And the Planetary Health Diet in no way seeks to prescribe-- you must wake up and have porridge for breakfast. You must wake up and have oats.
But there are actually nine. And the planetary boundaries that are affected by food production are climate for one. Biogeochemical flow, so that is the amount of nutrients that we put into the ground through things like fertilizer.
And we've got other examples of this happening. So the Planetary Health Diet recommends that you have something like red meat, maybe a portion once every two weeks or so.
what's termed planetary boundaries, staying within the capacity the planet has across all of its natural resources, is to eat a plant centric or plant
This is the Planetary Response Network, which is a partnership with a NGO called Rescue Global, who do quick response to things
No, they found an Earth-sized planet. It's the planetary scientists that will say, is it like Venus or is it really like Earth? Is it like the moon?
What are those parameters? Because you need planetary atmospheric scientists to do that kind of science. So the fantastic discoveries that are being made are being made between those disciplines, blending astrophysics and heliophysics and earth science and planetary
And under your leadership, you've been accomplishing so many missions, fly-bys of Pluto. Golden age of planetary science. Yeah, so I was head of Planetary Science from 2006 up until last year before I became the NASA chief scientist.
you look at them under a microscope-- and throw them everywhere. And so then the planetary scientists say, OK, when you look at the history of the moon and how it's been bombarded, maybe that stuff is chest-deep. So if you step out and you fall into that, it's game over.
But the investments and the encouragements and the activities that we've done to those companies-- for instance, like SpaceX, Blue Origin-- that now have rockets that can get up So as head of Planetary , a lot of our missions were really all about, let's look for life.
But the investments and the encouragements and the activities that we've done to those companies-- for instance, like SpaceX, Blue Origin-- that now have rockets that can get up As head of Planetary Science, I had missions that were moving forward.
I'm not a planetary scientist.
Earth Engine is petabyte planetary -scale analysis platform.
And of course, the connectivity of the world that your company has been so much a part of is also an interesting part of the story because unlike other first planetary flybys, historically, that happened in the late 20th century, the flyby of Pluto happened in an age where it could instantly be shared and collectively experienced around the world.
David is the best writer in our field. As a planetary scientist, no one has written better books from "Venus Revealed", about the radar missions that uncovered the geology of Venus, to "Earth in Human Hands", his most recent work before "Chasing", and quite a number of others.
But I think you could put them all on a three by five card. But to be a planetary scientist at the beginning of the age of space exploration, the most prized missions to be on were always the first missions.
But all those things are good. And so in planetary science, at our meetings, you'll hear us referring to Pluto a planet.
It is not planetary defense, which is a related term that NASA has interest in.
NASA has a planetary protection officer and office that worries about this.
It's planetary panspermia. It's the concept that planets, after they've formed in the solar system, they've been literally exchanging spit back and forth.