Hello, and welcome to SETI Live.

I'm your host, Beth Johnson, Communications Specialist here at the SETI Institute.

Welcome in to all of our viewers from around the world.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Please let us know in the comments where you are watching from.

Also, welcome to listeners on the podcast version of SETI Live, available on most podcast platforms.

Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean is a new book coming out today, and it offers a sweeping history of human encounters with the solar system.

Professor Dagomar de Groot reimagines the solar system as a dynamic network of interconnected systems, exploring how cosmic events and environments have influenced human history and understanding.

He treats the entire solar system as a network of interconnected systems of exchange and influence, all of which shape even the most innocuous facts of life on Earth.

Today, I am excited to be joined once again by Professor DeGroote from Georgetown University on this, the release day of his book.

Welcome back, Dagomar.

Hey, thank you so much for having me.

So, from Cosmic Chronicles to Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean.

So, this is sort of a very interesting specialization you have discovered for yourself, and I really enjoy it.

It's this bridge between sort of the universe, the solar system, the bigger pieces, and how they actually truly, truly, truly affect humanity and human life on this planet.

And if you've listened to Cosmic Chronicles, and if you haven't, why haven't you?

The first two seasons really get into some of the influences on evolution and humanity and how we have become, who we have become as a result of the changes in our physical environment, not just looking at the climate change that is occurring now.

That's not the point.

The point is to look at how it influenced where we came from as well.

And so can you bridge for us sort of the route from your podcast to this book?

Yeah, I'd be more than happy to.

So the Climate Chronicles, you can find it at theclimatechronicles.com.

And so with the Climate Chronicles, as we've discussed, what I'm trying to do is tell the story of climate change from before the evolution of our species all the way up through the present and then peeking into the future as well.

And when we look at the history of climate change before industrialization, so before the year eighteen hundred, it's a history that is shaped by what's going on in the solar system.

So it's shaped by changes in the axial tilt of the Earth.

the degree to which the Earth wobbles as it rotates, the ellipticity of Earth's orbit around the sun.

It's also shaped by changes in solar output, so how much energy the sun is able to release.

That fluctuates over time to a very small extent.

But the sun has such a huge influence on Earth that even small fluctuation will still matter on Earth.

Climate is also shaped before the industrial period by big explosive volcanic eruptions which release sulfuric gases into the stratosphere And when these gases sort of spread across the Earth, they reflect enough incoming solar radiation to affect the temperature of the surface of the Earth.

So there's all kinds of cosmic connections that have an important role in altering Earth's climate in human history.

So it's by really, it's by studying those connections over the last, oh my gosh, I guess it's been like, fifteen years, twenty years that I've been studying this stuff, that I've come to see the Earth differently, and I've come to understand its history as being part of cosmic environments, of the whole solar system.

And on the cosmic ocean, I imagine the solar system as, yeah, as you say, a network of environments, all of them dynamic, all of them changing.

And in changing, they actually affect us on Earth.

And they've influenced our history over the last five centuries in surprising ways.

And in fact, we started to alter now solar system environments ourselves.

And so the book kind of shows how we've altered those environments and where we should go in the future.

So what led to the book?

The podcast, obviously, the book was in process much longer than the podcast, I'm assuming, because books, books, man.

So what did you, while you were working on the book, did the podcast sort of come about or were they two separate ideas?

You know, honestly, I guess I could take the book back, my thinking about the book back all the way to my childhood.

I grew up in a small town in Canada, rural Canada.

The town is like three hundred people.

There's way more cows than people in this town.

And when I was a kid, I was always thinking about getting out and I was thinking about stuff that was this far away from that town.

Believe me, as far away as possible.

So I was thinking about, you know, very long time ago, far away in time, right?

So I wanted to be maybe an archaeologist or a historian.

But I was also thinking about, you know, spatially as far away as I could go.

So I remember thinking about, you know, distant stars and star systems.

And I wanted to maybe also become an astronomer.

was really my first love i think actually honestly it was outer space like so many of your listeners i'm sure right um um i was dreaming about about alien life and about distant distant cosmic environments um in in graduate school i learned about something called environmental history And I decided to do that.

I decided to really focus on how climate change had shaped human history, telling new stories about that.

But always in the back of my head, there was this idea of, you know, could I use history to say something new about where we're going in outer space?

And so after my first book, which is about um which was about climate change you can see it right here i decided to work on on a book on outer space and frankly the dream was which was partly unsuccessful, but the dream was to tell a more hopeful story.

I kind of perceived of the future in space as being hopefully a happy one, things expanding, things getting better.

And I wanted to do something maybe a little bit more uplifting.

than my work on climate change.

And I think I was only partially successful because Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean ended up being, to a large extent, about existential risk, about the things that could actually kill us all and how space science, you know, interpretations of change in cosmic environments has helped to reveal those risks to humanity, and in some cases even has helped us to actually reduce some of those risks.

I really appreciated the effort that you made in Cosmic Chronicles for trying to give hope you know, in the midst of, of everything that, that we see going on around us and, and your big takeaway was we're not without hope for doing things to make this better.

And we're also not without hope that because we have gone through these things before in other cases, in other extremes that, you know, we can survive this as well.

and adapt on the other side of it.

So I really appreciated that.

And I think the book is a bigger picture of it as well.

So it's very exciting.

I'm super excited for you.

I have to admit.

Well, thank you so much.

Yeah, you know, it's an anxious time, of course.

There's a philosopher, his name is Toby Ord, and he has a name for this time.

He calls it the precipice.

For him, this is a time of heightened existential risk.

So these are risks that threaten to bring about the extinction of our species or there are risks that in some way could lead to our future being limited.

Like you think of the year of nineteen eighty-four where all of humanity is under totalitarian regimes and there's no escaping that, right?

Big Brother will always rule in nineteen eighty-four.

Well, that would be an example of an existential risk come to life.

Or you think of something like a nuclear war by causing nuclear winter by cooling the Earth probably wouldn't kill us all, but it would break the planet for a thousand years or longer and thereby, I mean, obviously impact our future.

So for Toby Ord, we're going through this period of heightened risk.

And if we can make it through we can find the technologies and we can find you know the wise governance to control the new powers we've invented we've developed that are creating some of these risks than a golden future may await.

And that's very compelling to me.

That helps to inform some of my hope, because I think these new abilities, these new powers that we have over nature have certainly helped us to be healthier than our ancestors, to live longer, to expect our children to reach adulthood, to have much more access to information.

And and so that's a very hopeful and a powerful story.

But at the same time, we've created these terrible risks and discovered them in part and through space science.

And so that's a it's a you know, Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean is a book that really promotes the importance of not only space science, but actually the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which I argue in Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean has has helped to actually allow us to think about risks to our entire species and to the planet.

That is such an awesome point.

Because I know a lot of people are like, why do you have Dagomar de Groot on?

Well, Dagomar, you are a huge supporter of SETI as a concept, as well as the Institute.

And I love the fact that you have this, It's like you have your own personal overview effect.

When you talk about how you look at the world and the universe, you see this big picture aspect to it.

And when we talk about SETI, and specifically when we talk about the Drake equation, we're talking about technological risks, risks to a technologically advanced society.

How long can a technologically advanced society exist before something happens that either it destroys itself or it's destroyed from the outside.

So on the one hand, we have planetary defense, which is looking at the effect of comets and asteroids and that kind of thing and the possibility of what could happen that we don't really have control over, although we're trying to.

And then on the other hand, you have the existential risk that we're creating internally with the climate change issues that we're experiencing, the Industrial Revolution, and then not that we want to get into it here, but things of a political nature, things of a technological nature.

The threat of nuclear war when we were kids, when I was a kid, was definitely, it felt very real at the time.

So it doesn't necessarily feel as real right at this moment, but there, at the same time like maybe it's more so there's always this you know we have to look at how long can a civilization last in order for us to find it so yeah you know i i really appreciate that you you do take this broad look at things and say like you know this is this is where what we're experiencing and you know yes we have to make some extrapolations to extraterrestrial civilizations we don't have any examples beyond us but it's not and it's not entirely true because one of the things i really i also liked about cosmic chronicles was you talked about the different species of of humans that have existed that it's not just our homo sapiens that that have been on earth you know there there have been other you know human races that have existed species and and so i You have just pulled together so many things for me that I didn't even think about.

And I love that as an institution, we are trying to broaden and really pull in more different disciplines and really put them all together.

And your book, obviously, is doing that, right?

You're trying to layer...

this this high level universal stuff on top of how it impacts humanity.

So yeah.

Yeah.

So just a couple of just, you know, touching on a couple of things there.

The first thing would be how steady helps us to think about ourselves.

Right.

And and what's interesting for me, at least in working on the book, It's just realizing how far back the search for extraterrestrial life actually goes.

I trace it over the last five centuries.

And I think what I show is that different so-called discoveries of extraterrestrial life have occurred for hundreds of years.

You've got astronomers in the eighteenth century looking for the construction of lunar cities and thinking they've actually seen cities being built on the moon because they assumed that cities on the moon would be circular.

And why is that?

Well, because circular cities would be able to take advantage of sunlight at all times.

And so they were actually looking for the appearance and disappearance of craters.

And when they found a crater seemingly vanishing, they were like, well, we've found lunar life.

Or dust storms on Mars actually get astronomers to think about Mars as being an Earth-like world because they start thinking, well, what would Earth look like from Mars?

And they imagine, well, Earth would be very changeable, right?

Clouds are always changing.

Floods are always happening.

The ice caps are expanding and shrinking.

So they assumed that changes in the appearance of Mars, which we now know are actually caused by dust storms.

Well, those changes must have been caused by Mars being like Earth.

And from there comes the idea of Mars being covered with a network of canals that reveal the existence of an alien civilization, but not just aliens, aliens on a dying planet.

Mars is supposed to be older than Earth.

It's drying out.

And that makes it harder and harder for the Martians to survive.

So these canals then are interpreted as a way for the Martians to squeeze the last bit of water out of their planet, draining it from the ice caps in the poles, getting it down to the fields that still exist on Mars.

And of course, what that idea does for people at the time, this is the late-nineteenth century, it gets them to think about, well, are humans heading down the same path?

Are there already signs that the Earth is drying?

And some of these proponents of the canal theory say, yes, there have been fossils found in deserts, what are now deserts or dry land.

There is evidence of deserts expanding also because we know there were extreme climatic conditions in the late nineteenth century that brought drought to different places.

But then also people start thinking about the environmental devastation of contemporary empires as they're spreading and extracting resources.

So you get some of the first ideas that we might now call ideas about the Anthropocene and environmental risk coming from the apparent discovery of an alien civilization on Mars.

And I think that's a really, really powerful argument for SETI.

In this case, we have an example of the first some of the first ideas that we might conserve global environments, that we should do a better job of conserving global environments actually coming from the search for life, in this case on Mars.

I think that's a really powerful argument for SETI.

I'd also go back to another thing that you said about us not being alone.

And that was a very powerful, I think, idea for me that I wanted to bring out in the second season of the Climate Chronicles.

We used to share this planet with many intelligent species, and all of them are gone.

They all went extinct.

And one reason that they all went extinct is probably climate change, really extreme climate changes during the Pleistocene geological epoch, thousands and thousands of years ago.

And these climate changes were so extreme that the earth cooled by about seven degrees Celsius relative to where we are now during the coldest stretches of this period.

And that really, I mean, compare it to present day global warming, it's bigger than warming is so far.

Warming has been about one point five degrees Celsius since the late nineteenth century.

But the warming is really fast right now and it seems to be accelerating.

So we are again, you know, sort of setting in motion these extreme climate changes that doomed other intelligent species on Earth and that we only narrowly escaped.

That's a stupid idea.

We should probably stop doing that.

Dagomar, telling it like it is.

I'm going to come back to you in just a second.

I want to welcome in people.

I'm so fascinated by talking to you that I completely forgot.

So thank you, everybody, who is joining us today.

We have people watching from Sweden, England, North Carolina, Louisiana, Arizona, more Sweden.

I thought I saw another one.

Nope.

Okay.

So the Europeans are here in force and the people in the States are showing up.

So, yay.

Thank you everybody for watching.

Oh, Brazil.

Okay, cool.

Now we got another continent.

Yay.

So it should be a global discussion, right?

It should be a global conversation about what our place in the universe is.

And I love that this isn't just a sort of, you know, our place in the universe is this little tiny blue dot.

But you're talking about how this universe has impacted that blue dot in this book.

So what was, if you don't mind, the most surprising takeaway for you from this research?

Yeah.

Two things that I'll answer the question in two very different ways.

So the first thing I'll say is that the most surprising thing about writing the book and researching the book, just how much of the book ended up focusing on risks to Earth and the extent to which space science including SETI, has helped bring about, has helped to illuminate those risks.

We wouldn't know about many of them were it not for our constant sort of looking up at the cosmos.

And I think that's really important because so often we hear, You know, you shouldn't fund space exploration and space science and even crude space travel, right, human space travel, because what matters is what happens down here.

In reality, probably the biggest thing that this book reveals is that the division between Earth and the rest of the solar system is in part an illusion.

Right.

In fact, the solar system intrudes upon our lives all the time in profound and sometimes unpredictable ways.

And in looking out at the solar system, we realize what's endangering us right now.

So from nuclear winter, to climate change, to the ozone hole, to the threat of asteroid and comet impacts, of course.

But the list goes on and on and on.

These potentially existential risks that we only know about because we actually looked up, right?

We looked away from what happens down here.

So that's probably the biggest and maybe the most surprising takeaway for me about writing the book.

But then the other way that I'll answer that question is to talk about a specific discovery that I had.

And this was shortly after my son was born.

He was not sleeping.

And I just remember being delirious in the basement of NASA headquarters here in Washington, D.C., sifting through box after box of papers and just like, oh my gosh, almost falling asleep.

And then I came across one box.

I opened it.

I came across a document from from nineteen sixty four and the document described a meeting between important officials throughout the federal government.

They all got together and they talked about the Apollo moon landing missions and the chances of those missions bringing something back to Earth, namely microbes, microorganisms that had evolved to live on the moon.

And they asked each other, these important officials, well, could this pose a danger?

And they decided that, yes, it could, that microbes that were barely sort of squeaking out in existence on the moon, if they got back to Earth, they could multiply explosively through the warm and benign Earth environment.

And if they did, these officials decided, well, the worst case scenario is a total breakdown of Earth's biosphere.

Okay, so what do we do about that?

Well, they decided that they would quarantine the astronauts in the spacecraft when they got back to Earth.

But they also decided that if there was a dangerous microbe on the moon, then they could not actually keep it from escaping.

One way or another, it would get out of quarantine.

And the goal was really to delay its escape until a vaccine could be developed that could confront, that could eliminate the danger.

But I wasn't sure whether a vaccine could be developed at all, or if it could, how long that would take.

And it seemed like probably more than a decade.

All right, but what did they tell the public?

They told the public that they could stop any threat, that they had built the most advanced facilities, that there was no reason to worry, and there was no risk.

So here is an example of people being worried about space environments, basically completely destroying Earth environments, but then also deciding basically to accept that risk and seal it from the public.

And so, you know, in a sense, It's a this is a history of why you would choose to do that, to ignore these existential risks.

And I think that part, at least of the story, has a lot of relevance for now.

You know, you talk about AI.

AI is one of the biggest potential existential risks today.

But here again, we see, you know, a hyper competitive environment and people being incentivized to to ignore or you know, conceal potentially really bad risks.

Okay.

And the downer.

All right.

There's always got to be a downer.

There's always got to be a downer.

I'm going to welcome in a few more people.

We have people watching from Oregon, from Norway, and California.

So thank you so much.

Dagomar, oh, man.

If you have questions for Dagomar, please put them in the comments.

We are checking them, and I will go through them in a few minutes.

I'm not even sure what to ask anymore.

So that was the...

I'm going to have to sit with that for a little bit, because that's sort of...

It's depressing a little bit.

So give me some hope here, Dagomar.

What's the hope that we have?

So, okay, we're on this pale blue dot.

We're floating in a solar system, in a galaxy, in a universe.

Give me some hope that the existential dread does not need to take over my life.

Well, I'm a person who feels a fair amount of existential dread, but it's also easy to provide a hope, I think.

One source of hope comes from the progress we've legitimately made.

And I go through that as well in the book and in the Climate Chronicles.

So where do we see examples of progress?

Well, the ozone hole.

I was born in this time of nuclear war fears, of course, which unfortunately I've come back now, but also a tremendous amount of fear about the ozone hole.

When I was born, there was this hole in the ozone layer that protects life on earth from extremely damaging, extremely intense ultraviolet radiation.

And if there's no ozone layer, Then this radiation gets down to the surface, starts breaking apart DNA, also dramatically worsens anthropogenic warming, worsens climate change, a complete disaster event, right?

So hundreds of millions of skin cancer cases break down, you know, potentially in biodiversity and agriculture.

really bad news.

And in nineteen eighty five, it just keeps expanding every year.

It's just expanding.

And there's no guarantee that we'll be able to stop it.

But Nevertheless, there is an agreement, the Montreal Protocol, where it's decided to outlaw the leading substances that cause the degradation of the ozone layer.

Countries around the world agree to it.

And indeed, the ozone layer stopped growing.

And so we saved the future.

We saved the world in the nineteen eighties.

And I think that's that's incredibly uplifting, shown that it can be done.

Another example would be the risk of asteroid impacts, which was very poorly known in the nineteen eighties.

It seemed like there was a risk.

The overwhelming majority of people don't seem to have taken it seriously.

Certainly politicians did not take it seriously.

There was almost no funding for asteroid detection programs.

But between the late eighties and the early nineties, a series of events occurs from a near miss of the earth by a big asteroid to a comet collision on Jupiter.

I'm old enough to remember what that was like.

It was, that was really, really exciting.

I remember reading all these magazines about it and broadcasts and everything.

And as a result of these whole constellation of factors, including these cosmic factors, Planetary defense, as we now call it, was brought within the purview of NASA.

And there were a bunch of asteroid detection programs that got off the ground and started plotting the orbits of asteroids.

And the way that risk works, of course, is it's in part about what you know.

It's in part about perception.

So the more asteroid orbits you plot, the better a handle you have on the risk, the better you understand it.

And so the risk of an asteroid impact actually goes down with every plotting of an asteroid orbit where we've proven that it's not going to hit the Earth.

So now we've actually plotted a million asteroid orbits.

We understand the risk a lot better.

And we've even been able to send missions to asteroids that have actually been able to deflect asteroids, right?

And so we know we have that capability.

And as a result of all of this, the risk of being wiped out by an asteroid impact like the dinosaurs has gone way, way, way down.

So that's another example of an existential risk brought within our control.

And I'd give one more, and this one might be a bit controversial.

But it touches on the climate chronicles as well.

And it's the risk of runaway global warming.

So it might seem like the picture with climate change is getting worse and worse and worse every year.

And there's truth to that, of course.

Temperatures are still going up.

The rate of warming only seems to be increasing.

And last year, we set a new record for how much CO₂ we poured into the atmosphere.

So in many ways, things are getting worse.

But at the same time, the pace of decarbonization, the growth of the green economy is also accelerating.

Frankly, these days, that's thanks almost entirely to what's happening in China and to some extent in Europe, rather than what's happening here in the United States.

and we are going backwards but the rest of the world is still going forwards and as a result of that it seems so that there's still uncertainties that needs to be pointed out but it seems like the risk of really extreme and apocalyptic climate change by the end of this century is declining.

It has declined certainly from when I started at Georgetown.

You know, if we project forwards how much warming we will get by the end of the century, that number has gone down.

So, you know, there's another example, I think, of a risk that is being reduced but is still real with lingering and scary uncertainties.

Okay.

I feel better.

I feel a little bit better.

I want to kind of, there's a couple things from our audience that I want to address.

One is not really a question, but I think it is a question at the same time.

Eric has said, climate change will happen whether we want it or not.

We should focus on dealing with the aftermath.

And this is something I think you kind of do talk about in, you talked about in the Climate Chronicles.

you know, the changes that happened, what the aftermath was and how humanity dealt with it.

What is your take on this statement?

How do you feel about it?

Well, I disagree with the first part.

I have to confess.

But I guess it's a partial disagreement because it is true that climate change is just a feature of life on Earth.

And it's happened for as long as there have been human beings.

And it will happen long after we are gone.

So there's no doubt about that.

Um, however, right now we know that we are the cause of global warming because we've released two trillion tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Um, there's a new book called, uh, the story of CO two is the story of everything.

And, and it explains just, just, you know, it goes through just the sheer quantity of the carbon dioxide that we've released into the, into the atmosphere.

You know, it's crazy stat, but if you add up the weight of everything we have built and you add that to the weight of all living things on Earth, it's actually less than the weight of the greenhouse gases that we've released into the atmosphere.

That's the magnitude of the change.

And we know historically there's a very, very strong correlation between the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and the temperature of the Earth.

So there's no doubt about what we're doing right now.

We are, in fact, heating up the planet.

Now, in the second part of this statement, I think also, you know, I partially agree with in the sense that we should think a lot more about adaptations.

to climate change.

I think that's incredibly important.

I think it's made real progress over the last five years.

A lot of cities now have their own climate adaptation plans, right?

At the national level, things aren't going so great here in the US, but again, this is an area where a lot of communities around the world are moving forwards.

There's a lot more to be done.

And most importantly, the magnitude of the challenge of adaptation is directly tied to the magnitude of the climate change.

The hotter the climate gets, the harder it's going to be to adapt, right?

So what we ought to do is reduce greenhouse gas emissions, adapt to the warming that has already occurred or is in the pipeline.

And that way, there's gonna be a lot of benefits.

There's gonna be a lot of economic growth, as a result of building out the green economy, there's going to be far fewer deaths, not just because of climate change, but because of pollution from fossil fuels.

Pollution from fossil fuels kills thousands and thousands of people globally.

Well, a lot of that's going to be done if we focus on building out the green economy.

So there's a ton of stuff that we can do.

broadly beneficial, but when it comes to addressing global warming, you've got to reduce the emissions.

That's the first step.

From your lips.

OK.

So that's kind of everything on the topic of your book and all of that.

There is a question from an audience member who is a regular, and I like that they're asking it.

It's about your background.

like your physical behind you background.

Zach Van Damphan wants to know if there is any particular tree ring in that wood wedge that you have back there that is interesting, such as from eighteen fifteen in the year without a summer.

Oh, that's a good question.

So, OK.

First thing I'll say is that this tree was knocked down in a forest close to my home.

People were cutting up the tree and I got this wedge from that tree and I brought it into my office.

What I do now is I bring it into class sometimes when I teach courses about the history of climate change.

And I asked my students to count up the rings in the tree and then to create a graph of the growth of that tree because the thickness of the ring in a tree like this correlates to how much it grew, the tree grew in a particular growing season.

And one of the most important influences on the growth of a tree is the weather.

So trees like warm weather, not too hot, but warm.

And they like a good amount of rainfall, not too much.

So you can gain a rough sense of the weather over the life of this tree by using tree rings.

I should say that I created a series of videos about ripples on the cosmic ocean.

So if you go to YouTube and you look for my name, you can find these videos about ripples on the cosmic ocean.

And the second one, which I have to say, I'm so grateful that SETI has been promoting this.

Thank you very much, SETI.

The second one is about the archives of nature and specifically about tree rings.

So you can learn how we use tree rings to gain a sense of how climate has changed in the past.

one year in which it changed quite dramatically indeed was eighteen fifteen these rings don't go back that far um but what happened in eighteen fifteen was uh was a major and a spectacular and very important event for us right now actually which is the the detonation absolutely cataclysmic detonation of a volcano named tambora this is probably the biggest volcanic eruption in the last millennium possibly the last two millennia And it released so much sulfur into the stratosphere that the dust created by that sulfur actually cooled the world maybe by more than one degree Celsius.

And in some parts of the world, that did indeed lead to a very short and growing season.

People even called it a year without summer.

It's probably the coolest, the chilliest summer of the past millennium, for sure.

So a major, major event and a very important one for a few different reasons.

Probably the first one that comes to mind is that it reminds us, you know, we ought to prepare, yes, for global warming.

But we should also really be thinking about what will happen if a big volcanic eruption goes off.

What will that do to agriculture around the world?

How can we prepare now to adapt if something like this happens and to cope with it?

because statistically it's certainly a possibility over the next century, especially as we start to melt ice sheets in different places and the pressure on the crust starts to change, it's very likely that we'll have more big volcanic eruptions.

Tambora and the year without summer, eighteen fifteen, reminds us to think about how we would deal with something like that.

Exactly.

Thank you.

It is a fascinating story.

It is a fascinating topic.

Dagomar, you always bring just the most incredible information.

There is such a wealth of knowledge within your head.

I love it.

I feel like you and I should start talking once a week so I can feel better about the world at the same time that I'm feeling really crappy about the world.

Dagomir, thank you for being here today, obviously.

Today, Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean is out in bookstores and online.

Get a copy of it and let's all read this together and let's understand how we actually are influenced by our universe.

It's really great, the overarching perspective that Dagomir gives to all of these topics.

So thank you for being here and sharing your work with us.

Again, you can also find the podcast at the Cosmic Chronicles or the Climate Chronicles dot com.

Cosmic Chronicles is a thing we're doing, which is why they're both in my head.

So the Climate Chronicles.

Listen to that.

It is a wonderful, wonderful podcast.

Seasons one and two are out.

Season three is on the way.

We will be promoting it as always.

Dagomar, you are always welcome here.

Thank you again so much for being here and for talking to us today.

Um, as always, the study Institute is a five Oh one C three nonprofit, your bit subs, a super chat stars, all of these things go toward our outreach program.

And thank you very much for everything that you, that you do for watching, for commenting, liking, um, subscribing on YouTube, sharing it with your fellow space nerds, uh, you know, doing all of the things.

So.

Make sure that you do all of those.

And if you are interested in making a larger donation than bits and subs and super chats, you can head over to our website, SETI.org and click the donate now button.

Thursday, I'm going to be back on.

I'm talking with Eric Boyd from University of Montana at one p.m.

Pacific time.

And we're going to talk about a microbe that breathes two ways.

So kind of a little bit of a freaky story for Halloween.

And also we are working on another comet three eye update.

Still not aliens.

But we will we will have another update about that.

And hopefully this week.

And we'll have Frank and Ariel to talk about that with everybody.

And so, you know, get ready to bring your questions for that one as well.

Feel free to subscribe.

Please subscribe to our newsletter journey.

It comes out once a week and you can be updated on all of these events right directly to your email box.

So Dagomar, thank you once again for joining us.

And, you know, keep doing what you do.

It's really awesome.

And I am profoundly and deeply appreciative of it.

Thank you so much.

I'm so grateful to the Citi Institute, of course, for all the support you've given me.

You are very, very welcome.

We love having you around.

So thank you for enlightening us and enlightening everybody else.

All right, everybody.

Until next time, keep looking up and stay curious.