Episode 136: Transcript
Episode: 136: Who Wants to Live on an Eyeball Earth? With Aomawa Shields
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Annalee, do you remember back in 2005 when we decided to do an anthology about women in science, technology, and other geeky fields?
Annalee: [00:00:10] Yes, back in the mists of time, we were contacted by Seal Press, which was a publisher that focused on books by and about women, and they asked us what we wanted to do, and we said, well, we want to do something geeky. And so, we called this book She's Such a Geek, and it was an anthology of personal essays by women who had been in geeky fields and what it was like, which often was not super great.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:38] Yeah, and we still see that book for sale at conventions.
[00:00:43] You know, nobody had done a book of essays by geeky women and our publisher wasn't even sure if there was a market for it.
Annalee: [00:00:49] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:49] But then we put out a call for submissions and we got 200 amazing essays like right away.
Annalee: [00:00:56] Yeah, it was really, really hard to winnow it down to the ones that we got, and it was really meaningful for people, and even the essays that we didn't include, like, it was so interesting to learn about the similarities between the kinds of experiences that people had had. Feeling rejected by their male colleagues, or just feeling like they weren't being invited to stuff that other people were invited to. All of the big and small ways that people felt pushed out of geeky communities, but also ways that they felt included. It was also a real celebration of what it was like to be a nerd who just happened to be a girl.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:34] Yeah, and I still hear from people who that book meant a lot too, which is just so great. One of our favorite essays in the book was by a woman named Aomawa Shields, who talked about how she had dropped out of her physics graduate school and she went back to school and finished her PhD after she wrote that essay for us.
[00:01:53] And now she is a tenured professor of Astrobiology at UC Irvine and a former TED fellow, and she is just kicking so much ass. And we're going to be talking to her today about her new book, Life on Other Planets.
Annalee: [00:02:07] Yeah, it's really awesome to be able to connect with her again and see how she has blown up in the world of science.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:15] It just makes me so happy. And so, we're also going to be talking to her about the science of exoplanets and what kind of life might be able to survive on a tidally locked world that orbits a small, red dwarf star.
[00:02:27] So, you're listening to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science, science fiction, and the future and everything. I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm the author of the Unstoppable Trilogy. The final book, Promises Stronger Than Darkness is out now. I'm also the science fiction fantasy book reviewer for The Washington Post.
Annalee: [00:02:47] I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who writes science fiction, and you can find my latest novel everywhere. It's called The Terraformers.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:55] And to keep the tidally locked planet love going, we'll be talking next week about how I wrote a novel about the type of planet that Aomawa studies, and how I researched those extremely strange worlds, and how the scientific consensus shifted between the start of my writing process and the end.
Annalee: [00:03:14] And by the way, did you know that this podcast is entirely independent. It's free of nasty capitalist fat cats pulling the strings. Nobody's sucking our words into a giant AI machine that's turning us into little robots that just can only say, hello, hello, hello. None of that is happening.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:36] I mean, speak for yourself.
Annalee: [00:03:36] I mean, I'm just saying.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:38] Hello.
Annalee: [00:03:41] That's the only thing that people are going to say on podcasts in the future. And that's because we’ve stayed independent because of you funding us through Patreon. And so, if you become a patron, you're keeping this podcast free of robotic influence, you're helping us make the podcast, you're helping fund our wonderful producer Veronica Simonetti, and you get extras.
[00:04:04] We give you a mini episode every other week, so on the weeks when you're not having this official podcast, you'll get a little mini episode. And you get access to our Discord channel, where we hang out all the time, and we don't just share pictures of our cats, but that is something that we do. So, think about it.
[00:04:24] All of that could be yours for just a few bucks a month and anything you give us goes right back into making our opinions even more correct. Hello! Hello! Find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. Hello!
Charlie Jane: [00:04:40] Okay, let's get into exoplanets.
[00:04:45] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]
Charlie Jane: [00:05:16] Thank you so much for joining us, Aomawa. I'm so excited to reconnect with you after nearly 20 years.
Aomawa: [00:05:23] Oh my God. It's really been that long. Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:25] It really has. It’s bonkers.
Aomawa: [00:05:25] I am thrilled to be here.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:29] It's so great to be chatting with you again.
Annalee: [00:05:30] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:30] And it's wild that we've learned so much about exoplanets in such a short time. And you know, what do we know about planets outside our solar system that we didn't know like a decade or so ago?
Aomawa: [00:05:41] Well, we now know that there are over almost 5,500 of them now, and we did not have those numbers a decade ago. We knew they existed. Let’s see, a decade ago was 2013, so we were like halfway through NASA's Kepler mission, which operated for almost 10 years in space. It was looking at this one particular patch of sky in the direction of the constellation Cygnus, and it was taking pictures, well, not pictures, but it was looking for the light, that dipped from stars due to planets passing in front of those stars. And we found by the end of that mission, almost 3,000 planets.
Annalee: [00:06:21] Wow.
Aomawa: [00:06:23] So, Kepler alone took us into kind of the nearly exponential increase in planets in the planetary population. And now we've got 5,500 And we now have many more smaller earth-sized planets among that number that are the ones that I'm really excited about.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:41] Hey, one of the things I love in your book is how you talk about, like, how it was kind of an accident that Kepler started doing that work, that it was actually a failure of the Kepler's mission. I didn't know that, that like, that it was supposed to be doing something else, but then multiple redundant systems failed and it was like, well, I guess we'll just have to look at exoplanets instead.
Aomawa: [00:07:00] Well, I mean, we, we earmarked Kepler for looking for planets, but it was looking for planets in a particular way that we could no longer do once two reaction wheels failed. We didn't have the same facility, the same flexibility with that spacecraft once those reaction wheels failed. And so, we had to look and look along the ecliptic rather than in this direction of the constellation Cygnus.
[00:07:25] And what I love is that, like, engineers were able to really… that whole idea of take lemons, make lemonade. I mean, they were able to like say, okay, we have this spacecraft, it's in space. Some stuff broke. How can we still keep using it? And we were able to, which is pretty remarkable.
Annalee: [00:07:43] I feel like that's happened with so many of our missions where we've repurposed or the equipment has lasted longer than we thought and we've gotten more stuff as it's continued to boop along on Mars or something like that.
[00:07:57] And now we have a new space telescope, the James Webb. So, how do you think that's gonna change our understanding of exoplanets going forward? Like, cast your mind ahead ten years.
Aomawa: [00:08:07] Yeah, I mean, I'm really excited about James Webb. And the thing is that I remember being at conferences, five, six years ago when people were talking about James Webb and those of us in Earth exoplanets, kind of Earth-sized exoplanets, and that is our focus, we were talking pretty skeptically about what we thought James Webb could really do for us in that search.
[00:08:32] We thought, there's no way we're going to be able to confirm or look at the presence, look for Earth-sized planets with James Webb. And yet, we have, just this past year, confirmed the presence of an Earth-sized planet using James Webb. And soon, I think that the scientists who found that planet with James Webb are going to be looking back at that planet for atmospheric biosignatures.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:59] Wow.
[00:08:59] We're really looking for the atmospheric composition of that planet. And the thing about James Webb is that it can work in tandem with TESS, which is the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. That is literally Kepler's successor. And remember that I said that Kepler was looking at this one patch of sky towards the constellation Cygnus?
[00:09:19] TESS is an all sky survey. And it's looking for planets like Kepler was, but it's looking at for planets around the stars in the nearby solar neighborhood. And that means that those planets found are going to be much easier to follow up on with James Webb and this sort of next generation space instrumentation.
[00:09:39] So I think in the next 10 years, this number, 5,500, that we have now could easily be doubled within the next 10 years or maybe even more so. I mean, it's like, we're going to keep finding these planets and small planets around cool, small red stars that I love in particular, these M-dwarf stars.
Annalee: [00:09:58] I wanted to ask you one quick question before we get into M-dwarf stars, which is, you were saying that you're interested in Earth-like planets. And does that mean that you're focused on planets that have the rocky characteristics of Earth, or you want planets that are the size of earth, regardless of whether they're rocky or gaseous or something else.
Aomawa: [00:10:16] Mm-Hmm. When I say earth-sized planets, I mean, planets that are the size of the earth. And the thing about that, the reason why I say that is, if a planet is about one to one and a half times the size of the earth, the statistical work has shown that there's a strong likelihood that that planet is going to be rocky. And if a planet is rocky, then an ocean can sit on it and things, life could walk around on it.
There was a professor who, in grad school, who taught a class that I TAed in. It was a solar system class and he always said that if you can't stand on it, I'm not interested. So, like, you know.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:59] Yep, if you can't stand on it, I can't stand it.
[00:11:03] So, yeah, let's talk about M-dwarfs. When I started looking into tidally locked planets, like, a decade ago, one of the things that I was surprised to realize is that part of the reason why we care about tidally locked planets is because these M-dwarfs, these small red dwarfs are so common in our galaxy. Like they’re 70% of stars in our galaxy. And that's what we've got to work with. And tidally locked planets are going to be the ones that are in the habitable zone of those stars.
[00:11:30] So, could you tell us, why are these M-dwarfs so common? What is an M-dwarf and what makes them so important?
Aomawa: [00:11:40] Mm-hmm. Yeah, as you said, M-dwarfs… so that dwarf classification is rather confusing and I have to always, when I teach this to undergrads, tell them it's not… The dwarf actually means, we orbit a G-dwarf. So the dwarf simply means that all of these stars are at the same evolutionary stage where they are converting hydrogen into helium in their cores.
[00:12:04] So the dwarf is not meant to say anything about their size. However, M-dwarfs are cooler and smaller than our sun, and than a lot of other types of stars. And they are the most numerous type of star in the entire galaxy, 70% of all stars. Because they're cooler and smaller, a planet that orbits around a type of star that's an M-dwarf would have to orbit much closer in to get the same amount of light as a planet orbiting a sun-like or brighter star.
[00:12:35] In the same way that if you were at a beach and you were like at a huge bonfire, you wouldn't have to stand nearly as close to that bonfire to get the same amount of heat as you would if that was a little tiny little campfire. If it was a tiny campfire, you'd have to huddle up really close. The tiny campfires are the M-stars compared to our G, our sun-like stars or even brighter stars.
[00:12:56] And so when you get really close up to a star like that, a lot of interesting things can happen. And some of them are great, and some of them could be not so great. And this idea of tidal locking, so that when you're slowing, that gravitational force between the star and the planet is going to be much stronger because that distance is closer, and that force will slow down the rotation period of the planet.
[00:13:25] That's tidal locking, slowing it down. And any kind of slowing down of the rotation period we call tidal locking. And I know the term tidal locking is often used interchangeably with synchronous rotation, meaning slowing down so much that there's one side that's always facing the star and it's always day and the other side, it's always night. Those terms are actually not synonymous. Tidal locking is any slowing down that might happen, but synchronous rotation is the most extreme case. It's a spin-orbit resonance, which means it takes, in this case, it's one to one, so it takes the same amount of time that it takes the planet to go around the star is the same amount of time it takes the planet to turn around once on its axis. So, it makes one rotation on its axis in the same time as it makes one revolution around its star. Which means that its day is equal to its year.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:25] Right.
Aomawa: [00:14:26] And that's synchronous rotation. And that could be great for a planet, it could be terrible for a planet. And we've been spending a lot of time evaluating the pros and cons of this scenario along with many people in my astronomical community.
Annalee: [00:14:45] So that means tidal locking could be kind of a Game of Thrones type situation where you would just have like really long days or super random seasons or you might just have like a day that lasts for several months, but it's not it's not completely synchronous with its orbit around the Sun.
Aomawa: [00:15:03] That's right. It could be tidally locked, but not necessarily in that one-to-one synchronous rotation. You could have a two-to-one or a three-to-one. And then the season. I love that. My PhD advisor, Vicki Meadows, used to talk about Game of Thrones and I wasn't watching the show at that time. I have since watched the whole show. Oh my God, that show.
[00:15:28] I could never watch it now that I'm a parent cause it's just so violent and so crazy. But back then I watched it during grad school but I didn't know about it when she mentioned it and she was like, they're living on an exoplanet.
She just knew that because they were talking about the winter is coming, winter is coming and how winter seemed to last for years.
Annalee: [00:15:49] Yeah.
Aomawa: [00:15:49] Meaning that something was going on with the tilt of this planet. We know that the obliquity, how tilted our axis is, governs the seasonality of our planet and the seasonality of other planets.
[00:15:59] And so, yeah, there might've been some extreme tilt, which allowed for the seasons to be really extreme, and then, in terms of how long they lasted, you could have some kind of really elongated orbit and combine with like some kind of a spin orbit resonance that could have totally thrown this planet into the scenario that's depicted in that show.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:21] So, like I mentioned, 10 years ago I started researching tidally locked planets, and at the time, I feel like the conventional wisdom was we would only be able to live on that strip of twilight, the terminator as it's called. Because the day side would be too hot, the night side would be too cold and this would be like the kind of just right area, on the planet. So, that's the assumption I went with in my novel. It's the assumption I've seen in a lot of other science fiction.
[00:16:53] And I've read some of your recent papers. You just recently co-authored a paper about this. Now, there's this idea that we could have enough gaseous, like, the gases in the atmosphere could cause enough heat transfer that actually large swathes of the planet could be habitable.
[00:17:09] And, how are we going to know the answer to that? Is it going to be planet by planet? Is it going to really depend on how bright the sunlight is, or other factors?
Aomawa: [00:17:18] One thing we've realized in our work, which is really computer modeling based, we're filling in a lot of the gaps that exist in terms of what we can know from observations.
[00:17:31] There's only a certain number of things we really can know from observing planets at this point. Things like, how large a planet is, maybe how massive it is, maybe how tilted its orbit is, or its axis, or the shape of its orbit. Very little about the atmospheric composition of planets in general, and nothing yet about the atmospheric composition of Earth-sized planets.
[00:17:55] So, we have to fill in the gaps with, with our computer modeling work, and computer models really were what showed that if a synchronously rotating planet, if the atmosphere has enough of a greenhouse gas, such as CO2, a thick enough atmosphere, then it could distribute enough heat from the day side to the night side to avoid that kind of doomsday scenario of the night side getting so cold that the atmosphere literally freezes out onto the surface.
[00:18:28] That's always been our concern with these synchronously rotating planets is that like, as we said, the day side gets too hot. The nightside gets so cold that the atmosphere falls out and is snow and ice. And how are you going to breathe within that environment? And we've shown with computer models that that's not necessarily the case, that you can have that thick atmosphere that sort of makes the difference between day and night much more moderate compared to those extremes that we were worried about.
[00:18:55] And they've even shown with computer models that it could actually help. That's the pro side of synchronous rotation, that if you have a planet that's in the state that has an ocean, you could build up a bright enough cloud layer on the day side, and clouds can reflect, if they're bright enough, they're like a bright white thing on the day side reflecting light away, and that could cool the planet off and allow it to exist closer to its star without undergoing this runaway greenhouse that we think Venus succumbed to. And that could actually expand the habitable zone real estate for synchronously rotating M-dwarf planets. But you know, I love that the scenario that you've written about is something that we've actually proven using our climate models, that we could have planets that are too hot on the day side, too cold on the night side, and just right along that dividing line.
[00:19:53] Like, and that's why I love this work that we do. It's like, yes, it's cool to take actual planets that we've found and figure out how habitable they might be. And that's very important, and certainly funding sources and observers love it when we do that. But I also, the reason why I got into the field in the first place was I love turning knobs and to see like, okay, let's put a hypothetical planet around this type of star and see how its climate would differ from the same type of planet around a different type of star. Would there be any difference? And we got to see in my graduate work that yes, there would be, because different types of stars emit different percentages of light, you know.
[00:20:32] And that basic first knob that we turned showed that, wow, there's a big difference. Certain classes or populations of planets might be more habitable than others simply because of their host star’s light. And then we got to look at, could we make a planet be too hot on the day side and too cold on the night side and only habitable along the dividing line?
[00:20:57] And that was harder than we thought it would be, but we could do it. We were able to do it and we were able to show that it was easier to do it if the planets had less water on them.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:07] Oh, right.
Annalee: [00:21:09] That's so interesting. I wanted to ask you about water. Yeah. Because I feel like, I mean, we're a very water-centric planet. And when we look for other planets, of course, we're like, well, let's try to find a planet that has stuff that we recognize. It's this liquid corrosive that we just love. And you've written a lot about ice. And I was wondering why the ice form of water is so important and how it shapes the atmospheres of a planet or the atmosphere of a planet.
Aomawa: [00:21:40] Yeah, ice. It’s so funny cause my, my husband makes fun of me cause I get cold if it's like 60 degrees outside and yet I love ice. [Crosstalk] my work. I was like—
Annalee: [00:21:55] I mean, you want ice in the environment. That doesn't mean it needs to be like in your house or on your skin.
Aomawa: [00:22:02] I could still want to go to Alaska, but not actually think I could survive there. But anyway. I was enthralled by this property of water ice. That water ice is how it started. And then now we've gone even farther to think about different forms of ice.
Annalee: [00:22:20] Ooh. Like what?
Aomawa: [00:22:22] Carbon dioxide ice. I have a grad student who's about to submit a paper looking at the optical and infrared properties of carbon dioxide ice, because how reflective it is at different wavelengths is completely different compared to water ice.
Annalee: [00:22:36] Oh, right. Of course.
Aomawa: [00:22:38] And she's shown that. eccentric planets, planets with really oval-shaped, extremely oval-shaped orbits can go in and out of the habitable zone. And when they're out, they can get so far away that it gets cold enough in their atmospheres for CO2 ice to condense for CO2, the gas, to condense as ice.
[00:23:00] And what would that do if there was life on that planet? Would the life, could the life go into hibernation when the planet's at the farthest approach from its star? And then, that CO2 ice could then sublimate back into the atmosphere when the planet's close to its star and then the atmosphere then reappears.
[00:23:20] Like, how would that?
Annalee: [00:23:21] Yeah.
Aomawa: [00:23:21] That's a whole…
Annalee: [00:23:23] Also, CO2 snow, because as it's precipitating, it's going to be.
Aomawa: [00:23:26] That’s right.
Annalee: [00:23:26] In a sort of a snow form.
Aomawa: [00:23:26] That's true. That's true. You know, we have to, I have to mention that to her because…
Charlie Jane: [00:23:33] Oh my God.
Aomawa: [00:23:33] The actual form of that frozen condensate could affect certainly the ice thickness, whether it's ice or snow and as well as the environment.
[00:23:46] But yeah, ice has always fascinated me because its behavior changes depending on the type of light that hits it. And so that was the first indicator that this seemed like me on a scientific plate. I was like, wow, I always felt because I had this love of acting and love of science and astronomy that it seemed like there were two different sides of me that I rarely saw fully represented in one place.
[00:24:16] And then I learned about ice as a grad student and I'm like, oh my God, ice reflects the shorter visible light and UV light from a star and loves to absorb the infrared light from a star. And most of M-dwarf's light is infrared. And like, that basic difference allowed me to turn that into a dissertation.
[00:24:35] Let’s put a planet around an M-dwarf. A planet around a sun-like star, that emits a lot of visible light and UV light and see what the climates do. And it was a bit more complicated than that, but that was the basic premise. And I was like, whoa, the climates are so different and here's why, and it's about the ice and it's about the atmosphere, too, and how light interacts with it.
[00:24:58] So that naturally led me to, once I became faculty, to like, let's get into other types of exotic forms of ice. CO2 ice, and methane ice, and ammonia ice, and so we've started with the CO2 ice next, and other surfaces. Land. Planets could have land on them. What kind of land? It could be calcite, it could be granite, it could be a combination of all these different forms, and we looked at an actual planet, Trappist-1, The star has many planets, seven of them that are all Earth-sized and a few of them are in the habitable zone.
[00:25:35] And we were able to apply this kind of surface-star interaction and atmosphere interaction to talk about what these planets’ climates would be like if they had different types of surfaces on them.
Annalee: [00:25:45] Okay, we have to ask you about the eyeball planet. Because one of the—
Charlie Jane: [00:25:50] I'm obsessed with the eyeball earth.
Annalee: [00:25:55] I mean, I think, I think we're all obsessed with eyeball earth. I mean, there's snowball earth, which is also very exciting, but eyeball earth would be a planet where the whole world is frozen except for a part that's facing the sun. So, we're assuming that this is a synchronous rotation, I guess. And it's creating kind of an eyeball where like there's just this one area of unfrozen land, water. Could humans live in the pupil of that eye? Like what would that be like?
Aomawa: [00:26:21] Oh my gosh, I'd love to think about that more. You know, Ray Pierrehumbert was the, the scientist who postulated this eyeball Earth in a paper. And I think he was looking at a specific planet. I want to say it was Gliese. It had a 581 or it had a phone number for a name. I think it was a planet whose existence was later disputed. But that really wasn't relevant to the whole climate state that had been identified. If that planet doesn't exist, other planets might exist with this particular state.
[00:27:00] And I think the fascinating thing about that study was to show that it's stable. That he was able to find, using climate models, I will say, that having just one open, a little eyeball of open ocean with the rest of the planet frozen, could be stable. Because normally we'd expect that if you've got that much ice eventually that ice is gonna close up that eyeball.
[00:27:25] But, and I'd have to revisit that study to see what the assumptions that, that he used, what was done there. But he was able to show that you get a pretty wide swath of open ocean. We know on earth that everywhere there's water, there's life. So why couldn't life exist in that little eyeball? There’s life in much smaller areas of open water on our planet.
[00:27:53] And of course, even if it wasn't an open eyeball. If the eyeball was closed over, Jupiter's moon Europa has a complete ice shell and yet we know there's a liquid ocean underneath that ice shell and we're going back, we're going to Europa to actually drill through that ice and see how thick it is, for real and if there's something swimming around in it.
[00:28:15] So, subsurface life could exist as easily, potentially, as surface life.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:23] Yeah, so years ago, I was talking to an exoplanet expert, and she was saying that in real life, the chances of us finding another planet where humans could live were really remote, like Earth was not habitable to humans for long periods of our planet's history, and if the atmospheric pressure on another planet is even like a tiny bit over what we're used to, we can't survive. There could be any number of gases in the atmosphere that we couldn't handle, to speak nothing of bacteria and other potential pitfalls.
[00:28:53] Do you agree with her? Is it going to be really much harder than we think for humans to find another planet to call home?
Aomawa: [00:29:00] Well, that view I've heard expressed quite a bit. There's even been a book written about it, a similar view, called Rare Earth. There's a rare earth hypothesis, which is that our planet was unique in the set of circumstances that led to life arising here and that it's not a very common thing to happen. And it's certainly… can't deny that that's a possibility, but I always love to think about that movie Contact, which when talk to students when I share with students about this movie, today, I'm like, this movie came out before you were born. It's like…
Charlie Jane: [00:29:36] Oh my God, I feel old.
Aomawa: [00:29:36] Because it did. It was 1996, right?
Charlie Jane: [00:29:40] I’m so old.
Aomawa: [00:29:40] And these students… Yeah, I feel ancient when I say that. I’m like, how many of you have seen the movie Contact? And I get like maybe three hands in the 70 person class, but I'm like, go watch that movie. In that movie, Jodie Foster's character, Eleanor Arroway, and it's an even more fabulous book by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan.
[00:30:00] She says in the movie, “If it is just us, it would be an awful waste of space.”
Contact Clip: [00:30:07] Now there are 400 billion stars out there just in our galaxy alone. If only one out of a million of those had planets, alright? And if just one out of a million of those had life, and if just one out of a million of those had intelligent life, there would be literally millions of civilizations out there.
Well, if there wasn't, it'd be an awful waste of space.
Amen.
Aomawa: [00:30:45] And I feel that way, too. I mean, that's my view, is that we have 1022 stars in the observable universe and just wrapping our heads around what that number is, is quite difficult. But I use an analogy in the book where I say, and that analogy was not new, I didn't think of that. That came from Jeff Bennett's book, I think it's called, Life in the Universe.
[00:31:06] And it was the number of stars in the observable universe is comparable to the number of dry grains of sand on all the beaches in the world. And thinking about just picking up a handful of sand at your local beach and think about how many grains are in that handful. And then now think about the rest of that beach and then all the other beaches that exist on this planet. And then we're getting in the ballpark of how many stars exist. And we know that just about around every star is a planet and maybe 20-25% of those are in the habitable zone. That's an awful lot of options of possibilities. And so, I come back to, if it is just us, it'd be an awful waste of space.
Annalee: [00:31:54] And really lonely.
Aomawa: [00:31:59] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:31:59] So we're going to take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to talk about Aomawa’s amazing career in the arts and in science.
[00:32:09] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:32:13] So one of the things that's super interesting about reading your memoir is that you've had this really unconventional career. You got an MFA in acting, you studied writing with Natalie Goldberg, and you've also now had this amazing career in astronomy. And you talked, toward the end of the book about this myth that we have that science and art are somehow diametrically opposed. And I wonder if you could talk about what the problem is with that myth? Why is that so damaging?
Aomawa: [00:32:41] Gosh, I love that question. Yeah. Well, I mean, that was a perception that I certainly had throughout a large part of my early life, was, science is over here and science doesn't care about how I feel about what I'm learning. Science and the people who practice it simply want to know if I can do the work, generate the results, learn the material to regurgitate on the exam, do the problem set, but no one's going to ask me, hey, how do you feel? How are you processing what you're learning? Like, how do you feel about it? And yet, then there's art. What I found with acting was over there and they wanted everything about me. They wanted my feelings, my emotions, my childhood traumas and victories and they wanted me to just put it all right under the surface to be used to embody character after character.
[00:33:34] And that, for a while, I kind of held those two things so far apart. And I think that was maybe because I would talk to people as a kid about liking those two things, and it was like, Whoa! That's, where did that come from? How do you work that out? And I internalized that as, oh, I have to figure this out. I have to choose one or the other. It can't be both.
[00:33:54] And the way I feel about it now is so different. They're both about stories. And that, as I write in the book, is, that was the common theme there. That was the link, is that everybody has a story. The people on stage, those characters, obviously, have a story, and it's easier to see that there's a story there. But so, too, do planets and stars and galaxies. They have stories. They have births, their lives, and then they have death, as well. And when we take data as a scientist, whether it's of astronomical phenomena or cells, stem cells, or whatever. The data have a story that they're telling and my job is to uncover the story that those characters are telling. What are my data telling me and how do I tell that story in a paper or in a talk?
[00:34:45] And how I feel, I'm no longer subscribed to the view that the personal and the professional are so far apart and never the two shall meet. In fact, the personal completely informs my ability to practice my profession, and I'm no longer of the mind of like, well, I made my to do list of ten things I was gonna do. I happened to only get three hours of sleep last night, but darn it, I'm gonna do those ten things.
[00:35:14] Like I don't… I used to do that, really. I’m no longer acting just from my mind, my mind's little plans and desires anymore. It's, there's more of a connection to my body. And I think that it really did start with the acting, which allowed me to remember, oh yeah, there's all these parts of my body that can be used to make my voice stronger. It's not just me talking from the neck up. There's resonance. There's a chest resonator. There's a nasal resonator. But even then, it was hard for me to recognize that not only could I use my body as a tool, but I also could listen to my body as a guide.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:55] Yeah, I feel like we've all had to have a conversation about burnout in recent years and about what happens when you burn yourself out because you don't listen to your body or because you don't bring the personal into your professional life. When you wrote an essay for our book She’s Such A Geek, back in the day, you kind of talked about being discouraged from sticking around in a physics graduate program after you had already crushed it at MIT. And what I found eye opening about reading your memoir is that you go into way more depth about kind of the burnout that you'd had after MIT and the imposter syndrome that kept you from accepting help or from taking advantage of some of the resources that you could have had.
[00:36:34] So I was kind of wondering, do you think that burnout and imposter syndrome are two of the barriers that a lot of marginalized students face in STEM as much as just the actual rejection?
Aomawa: [00:36:46] I do. And I want to take a moment to thank both of you for the opportunity to write that essay in your fabulous anthology.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:54] Aww.
Aomawa: [00:36:54] Because it gave me the first indicator that, like, I had a story to tell and that it was not only worth telling, but that it could speak to others. Because essentially the book is like an expanded, it goes into a lot more detail of what happened after that, but that was the first kernel of that acting/astronomy conflict.
[00:37:18] So, thank you so much.
Annalee: [00:37:18] Yeah, it’s an incredible essay. Definitely recommend that folks go out and check it out to see the seed of this memoir.
Aomawa: [00:37:25] Yeah. Yeah. I think that burnout and imposter syndrome are both two things that a lot of students face, a lot of young students, and particularly students from historically marginalized communities.
[00:37:37] We've had a lot of discussion that's come out in the last few years around systemic racism and how prevalent it can be in academia and there's been a lot of good that's come out of that, which is many academic departments are thinking more clearly about how do we not only get Black and brown students here, but how do we keep them here?
[00:37:59] The thing that I think can often cause burnout is when the Black and brown students themselves feel that sort of pull to be intimately involved with that institutional change. Whether it's doing more outreach, being on diversity committees, being that person of color that can be the representative in those spaces.
[00:38:21] And I have felt that pull myself and yet the responsibility of change, of that institutional change does not lie with the historically marginalized students. It lies with those who recognize the need for change and are in the majority. And the historically marginalized students need to, in my opinion, use that time to rest, take care of themselves, be their best so that they can flourish and thrive in the communities and make space for, pave the way for others to be able to.
[00:39:00] So, when you've got, on top of like the regular work that you're doing, your academic work. That burden or that pressure of making it right for others or taking on the demands of that change that can contribute a lot to burnout. And then you're also dealing with your own, or in my case, that feeling of like, as if I'm not worthy or I'm not enough in those spaces.
[00:39:29] So, it's like working, working, working, always thinking that it's not enough. And then, but I want to do this and that and that, instead of keeping it as simple as possible. And these are some of the things that I've been thinking about in the last several years. It’s like, my first duty has to be to myself.
[00:39:48] And just by being in these spaces, these students are already affecting change by showing up day after day, by being themselves, by doing their work. They are being the change. And I hope it's important to also follow our callings. And so, I know many students also feel called to do more outreach. But it's important to recognize that when you do extra things, that's adding one more thing to your plate.
Annalee: [00:40:18] There's this really intense, heartbreaking moment in your book where you talk about getting tenure and you have this knee jerk reaction of like, is this because of George Floyd? Like, did I? And you kind of go back and you check the dates to see if he was still alive when you got tenure and really that was just a sense of that imposter syndrome that we've been talking about.
[00:40:42] And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you see imposter syndrome fitting into your career and how you try to maybe help other people coming into STEM fields who are from marginalized backgrounds, like kind of think through that imposter syndrome and like maybe try to see it for what it is?
Aomawa: [00:41:03] Yes. Yeah, that moment of wanting to check and make sure that this thing that I'd worked for, for so long, for so many years, wasn't given to me by anything, for any other reason than I worked hard for it and I deserve it.
Annalee: [00:41:23] Yeah.
Aomawa: [00:41:23] Imposter syndrome is always probably going to be present for me. I remember asking a mental health professional who ran a process group for graduate women of color at UW, where I got my PhD. He was a Black male and he made this safe space for us to come and just talk about what was going on in our graduate careers. And we asked him, does imposter syndrome ever go away? And he said, nope, and he’s like, it just, it gets a little quieter. And I found that to be true.
[00:41:54] So, I think what I'd like to share with students who have the imposter syndrome and are suffering from it, start collecting evidence. And I wrote a blog post about this a long time ago on my variable star girl website. And it was, my mind loves to play tricks on me. It loves to tell me stories. I'm a storyteller, so it can tell me lots of stories. The story of not enough, the story of different, the story of don't belong. So, I need the facts as a scientist. I need to rely on the evidence, the facts in front of me, the diploma I've gotten, the first author paper receipt, the email from an advisor or someone I respect saying, hey, this draft is really strong here. The letter from a student in the class I TAed or taught that said, gosh, I loved your class. You're such a great teacher. Like those things, that's out of my brain that I can look at and realize, oh, okay, that doesn't match the story my brain is telling me. Why don't I trust instead the facts and recognize that the feelings I have, aren't truth. They're just feelings, they change, they come and go. Some days I think I'm killing it, other days I'm like, oh my god, I'm gonna be found out, and that's just real. So let me instead focus on the facts in front of me.
[00:43:25] And share it, you know, share when that imposter stuff comes up. What I learned about the first PhD program in astrophysics that I started and left was that imposter feeling, that it proliferates in isolation.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:40] Oh, yeah.
Aomawa: [00:43:40] But when we gather community and we see how really not unique we are in having these feelings, that helps it get quieter for me when I talk to other people that are safe, that I trust, and I say, oh my God, I feel like I'm blah, blah, blah. And I'm reminded that other people feel that way and that this is simply something that I may always have to accept about myself, that I've made different choices than others, but that doesn't mean that my choices are not as good or that I don't belong as much. They're just different. And I don't need to compare myself to anyone else. Cause that's like comparing apples to carburetors. They’re nothing like each other. So, but I can still just go along on my way.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:24] Final question. You mentioned that when you were up for tenure, you kind of got some pushback about your focus on science education, which obviously has played your strengths as having been in the arts.
[00:44:38] And like, why is there this stigma about science education and science communication to teach the general public as opposed to like writing for an academic audience? And how can we fix that stigma?
Annalee: [00:44:47] Yeah, fix it all for us.
Aomawa: [00:44:49] I know...
Charlie Jane: [00:44:53] One, two, three. Yeah, go. Easy, easy. Oh, yeah, just get the magic wand out, please.
Annalee: [00:44:58] We just need more ice.
Aomawa: [00:45:01] That's right, let's freeze over the planet. I don't know the answer to that question explicitly, but if I'm thinking off the cuff, there is a bit of a history of like the traditional practice of science. And a traditional practice of science involves taking your data and writing your paper and then once your paper's out you go to a conference and you're sharing about that work and maybe you'll go share about it occasionally in a public talk or something, and that's okay.
[00:45:37] If you try to imply that public engagement must be, or can be as important as the traditional science, traditional practice of science and research scholarship, then that's when there's a lot of things that people have to say about that.
[00:45:55] And I think that's changing, though. I have to say, within my own department, even though there's been some discussion about whether my book is constitutes physics, you know, that's not necessarily the overwhelming viewpoint that has been expressed.
[00:46:10] You know, that might be a few people who have that kind of traditional mindset of, this is what science is, and anything else is not science. I think that definition of science is expanding to include more science education and an awareness that it's we can't simply practice our science in our cubicle, in a vacuum and expect to keep on practicing said science.
[00:46:38] At the very least if we want to receive funding to continue to practice science, we need to learn how to make that science more palatable to people who are not trained a scientists.
[00:46:48] And I think most people can get behind that. That it's having that ability to make difficult science concepts understandable to a broad audience is viewed favorably. But I do look forward to a time when I won't have to make the case or that it's not as much work to make the case for how important public engagement is. That I won't have to make sure that I've shown how much research output I've had on top of my public engagement work. That I won't have to show that, that it's been on top of what I've already done in the traditional science realm.
[00:47:33] I long for a time when it could be viewed interchangeably rather than like, yeah, you can do it as long as you make sure you do all the other things all the other faculty are doing. Because that then almost necessitates this kind of added on productivity that I'm recognizing is simply not sustainable.
[00:47:55] But I think it is changing. It’s just a little bit more slowly. And I think the younger faculty get, honestly, the more progressive I see. So, like we have kind of the old guard that are kind of retiring and with that, the more progressive faculty who are more aware of the importance of making connections across disciplines and outside of academia.
[00:48:18] And I think that makes me very hopeful.
Annalee: [00:48:22] Yeah, it’s exciting to imagine like future science memoirs and science art that's coming out of science departments. I think that that's a hopeful…
Charlie Jane: [00:48:32] That's a very utopian future.
Annalee: [00:48:33] A nice way to wind up here is imagining that future. Thank you so much for joining us and for all the work that you're doing and this fabulous book, which was just an incredible introduction to bringing together art and science.
[00:48:46] So. thanks again for coming on the pod.
Charlie Jane: [00:48:49] Yeah. So, Aomawa, can you tell us where people can find you on the internet?
Aomawa: [00:48:53] Yes. Thank you. Please visit my website, AomawaShields.com. That's A-O-M-A-W-A-S-H-I-E-L-D-S.com. And you can also learn more about the program that I run, Rising Star Girls at risingstargirls.org. We just finished our summer workshop and we have lots of exciting things in store for the next five years.
Annalee: [00:49:17] Amazing.
Charlie Jane: [00:49:17] That's wonderful. Thank you so much. Yay.
Aomawa: [00:49:21] Thanks for having me.
[00:49:21] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Charlie Jane: [00:49:26] Thank you so much for listening. If you just randomly stumbled upon us, you can find this podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Apple, Google, Flargol, Burble. And if you like it, please leave a review. It really helps a lot. And, you know, we just really welcome anybody who wants to subscribe to our podcast.
[00:49:44] You can also find us on Mastodon at ouropinions@wandering.shop. And we have a Patreon at patreon. com/ouropinionsarecorrect. And we have an Instagram also at @ouropinions.
[00:49:57] Thank you so much to our heroic, brilliant producer, Veronica Simonetti. Thanks also to Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez Nichols for our incredible music.
[00:50:09] And, you know, we'll be back in a couple weeks with another episode, but if you're a patron, we'll see you in Discord and we'll be back next week with another mini episode. Bye!
Annalee: [00:50:18] Bye!
[00:50:18] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]