Understanding our Universe through the lens of NASA with former Head of Science Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen

[applause]

Welcome to the stage, Vice President of Launch at SpaceX, Kiko Dontchev.

All right, Summit! Hey guys. So I have the really awesome opportunity to introduce someone who I've known for a long time. He's my mentor, he was my professor in college, he was a partner and someone I work with at NASA. And it's really going to be amazing to talk about the universe and what it means to run a large team and do incredible things.

So Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen got his PhD in Switzerland in '96, after which he moved to Michigan and led space sciences studies there. Also, after doing a bunch of research, he got really into entrepreneurship actually, and started one of the first university programs for entrepreneurship in the country — the Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Michigan. But he was feeling a little bit like he wanted something more, and he got the unique opportunity in 2016 to effectively leave Michigan and go be the head of science at NASA.

He spent six years there. In that time, he landed a large rover on Mars. He launched the largest telescope humans have ever put into space, to help us look deeper and farther into the universe. And he did one of my favorite missions, called DART, which was the first planetary protection effort we've ever had, where we actually launched a small satellite into an asteroid and redirected it, to help us in the case that a real bad day was coming and something was headed towards Earth.

So it's really awesome, and I'm really excited to welcome Thomas to the stage. Please, a round of applause for Dr. Zurbuchen.

[applause]

Well, I'm so excited to be here. And thanks for wearing the Michigan hat. Go Blue! Exactly right.

Well, what I really want to tell you is two stories at the same time. One story is one of human exploration, and one story is that of building teams. And what I'm going to tell you is that both are needed to kind of transcend boundaries that are up there.

For me to tell you that story, it only makes sense if I tell you a little bit about myself. I started in a little town in the mountains of Switzerland. There's a lot of amazing things in that town. You're looking there in the center, kind of towards the third on the left, at the house I grew up in. Very few houses are there because they're all farmers. In fact, there was not a single student, not a single engineer, a single scientist there.

But what I had is a gift, and that is public school. And I went and did a test — what could I be if I grow up? And what came out was engineer and scientist. I was like, I haven't met any of those people. What do they do? And so I went and looked at this.

The other thing that was so amazing about this home are the dark skies. And I spent a lot of nights on the roof of the house looking at the dark skies. I learned all the constellations. And not only did I think about the worlds out there, I always wondered if somebody else was looking back at me and thinking about me looking in this direction. And it's that kind of big view from a small town that really transcended my thinking.

And I went in this public school and I had a class, and I did a lot of physics. Eventually I studied physics. But the class that made me decide to study physics was a class about this gentleman — of course, that's Copernicus. See, what I learned in that class — it was a philosophy class, not a physics class — what I learned in that class is that this individual, looking at the data of our universe, not only changed how we think of the universe, but also history itself on Earth.

To me, that's mind-blowing. The fact that we can look at nature, we can look at the world around us, everything we know, the boundaries of what we know, and as we transcend these boundaries, we chart a new future. We can in fact change how we think about ourselves.

Of course, this was the story of Copernicus, which was kind of a sad story, because most of what he knew he only released on his deathbed. Why? Because he knew it was going to get him into deep, deep trouble. Because if you tell the bosses of this planet that the planet, which was believed to be in the center of the universe, is not really in the center of the universe but instead goes around the star — the sun — they feel degraded. They feel like something happened to their power. Not only the kings, but also the popes and the priests — they feel like something bad happened to them.

That, about 150 years later, really came to bear when another step happened, and that is when technology entered the picture. And of course, what you see here is an artistic depiction of Galileo, who in 1609 put a canister, a tube, and glass together and built the first telescope. It's not that impressive a telescope, but what he did is he looked over there.

And what you see here is a document — on the right, at the University of Michigan library, by the way, with the Michigan hat — it's right there. And basically what he shows there is that Jupiter, when he looked at Jupiter, he found celestial companions of Jupiter. That there are other moons of Jupiter — the Galilean moons, as we call them. And he published that work. And of course, it got him into deep trouble, just like what Copernicus worried about. He was put on house arrest. It changed his entire life. But what it did is it changed the way we look at the universe. This new technology changed the way we look at the universe forever.

I always wondered how that felt — looking at the sky in a new way and looking at the universe in a new way and figuring out something both about the universe but also about us. Doing so. And the story I'm telling you is: I experienced that. And I experienced that last year, when for the first time I looked at data that was scattered by a telescope that was really unusual.

The telescope that I'm going to talk to you about is the James Webb Space Telescope. If you look at the mirror, you realize it's not one piece of glass like every other telescope ever built before in space. It's 18 pieces of glass. And of course, the reason for it is that the size of that mirror is 21 feet across. And I know Kiko and his friends are working on bigger rockets, but right now there's no rocket where you can fit 21 feet across in there.

You can say, why would we want to build a mirror that big? And the answer is, the part of the universe we want to observe is something we've never seen, which is the earliest part of the universe, where basically all the signals are really old. So the light is going to be really old — I'm going to talk a lot about time — but it's also mostly in the infrared. So suppose you are out there: even if your eyes were 21 feet across and you could see into the universe, your eyes would not see it, because it's infrared. Your skin is detecting infrared — you know, when you're next to a campfire, you feel the skin detecting heat. So those heat signals need to be reflected, so again, you need a big mirror.

If you look far away, the other thing you need to do is build a cold mirror. And to build a cold mirror means that you need to protect yourself from all radiation that's out there — radiation especially from the sun, but also from the Earth and also from the moon. That mirror — in fact, there's five layers that are perfectly shaped, the size of a tennis court — and you need to deploy that in space. Again, all this stuff does not fit in a rocket. So what you need to do is build an origami of sorts, in which you kind of squeeze it all in a rocket and you deploy it into its magnificent shape that's out there. And then you need to look back in time.

And frankly, many of these systems you can actually not test, because there is no clean room that's big enough to have the whole system deployed anywhere on Earth. So that's what the job is.

Now what's really important when you look at that is to recognize there are problems we look at — and many of you think about that also — they are bigger than one nation, bigger than one continent. It's a humanity-scale problem. And that's what I want to give you a sense for. When you want big things like that, you need everybody. And in this case, we need basically most of the states in the United States, three space agencies — the European, the Canadian space agencies — many countries that supply specific technologies that only exist there, and that needs to come together as a whole to do great things like that.

Whether it's about the universe — and I believe that having launched 37 missions, started another 60-plus missions — it's a team. And it's not just a team made out of like-minded people. It's a team made out of people with different backgrounds and different opinions. And even a guy who grew up in the mountains, kind of in a small world, has a place in it. And that's what I learned as I did that. So that diversity of thought, that kind of clash of different types of opinions and different skill sets, is one that is absolutely critical. And it's in fact, I consider, absolutely enabling as we look at big ideas like building a telescope like this.

Now, I want to tell you, this was really hard. In my last six and a half years, I spent at least one to two days off per week, every week, on that telescope. And when I joined NASA, I remember I went to these meetings and everybody told me everything is great. And they come with these stoplight charts — they were all green. Green on cost, green on schedule, green on technology.

And roughly a month into it, I noticed, wait, that doesn't look like it's green. The words say it's green. And I took notes. And I want to tell you, it took me almost a year to notice that it's not only not green, it's absolutely red. And basically what we had done is build a telescope that, frankly, had huge challenges.

You see me there testifying to Congress. I don't recommend that. Especially not when screws and washers are falling off the telescope.

[laughter]

And of course, what happened — and that's the important part of building these teams — is, well, do you believe as a leader? That only matters if you manage to propagate it into the team. We did not have the same attention, the same excitement, the same care all the way down at the technician level that we had up there. In fact, we had many secrets in the team that we were not talking about. Frankly, the path forward was not easy.

We got a lifeline, a final lifeline from Congress for — I mean, frankly, $800 million more after a tough fight. And frankly, I wasn't even sure it would be successful. I got an independent group, and they said, you can be, but you need to fix these 32 problems. We fixed them.

And we tried to launch this rocket. By the deal that was made long ahead of me, we wanted to launch it from French Guiana, which is in South America. That's where a rocket is launched by the Europeans, that actually uses the rotation of the Earth because it's so close to the equator. And we were there. And finally, on Christmas Day, this is what happened.

"Standing by for terminal count. Ariane 5, from a tropical rainforest to the edge of time itself. James Webb begins a voyage back to the birth of the universe."

[applause]

I want to tell you why I love launches so much. First of all, it's not just that a rocket does what is really hard to do. Because if you put a needle up on the desk, it wants to fall over. The rocket wants to do that too. So because of the control system and all the engineering that goes into it, the rocket goes straight up. But what I love about it — it's the ultimate act of defiance against gravity. I'm taking off, away from the Earth, even though the Earth pulls me back as much as it can.

And finally, one and a half hours or so later, we saw for the last time the space telescope with our own eyes. You see at the bottom there, me clapping, with my colleagues. And you see the telescope taking off.

Do you see the ring there? That's how it was attached to the rocket as it came off. By the way, the only reason the camera was there is because two launches before, Ariane 5 had a major technology problem, and so we put the camera there to make sure it all worked. And to our surprise, not only did we see the telescope going away — just wait a little bit — all of a sudden you see the solar panel come out. The final step of that day, the final goal of that day. Because if you have a spacecraft without a solar panel, it's just a chunk. The spacecraft with the solar panel — that's its power system — is a spacecraft that can in fact do these discoveries.

Do you see it coming out right there? I remember sitting in that room, and around me everybody was in tears. None of us expected that we would see that. It was a huge surprise. And we were in tears, of course, not only because of the amazing mountain we had to climb to get there, but also because so many of us had spent a large fraction of our time with this, and we'd always dreamed about achieving that goal. Those moments are amazing.

By the way, December 25th is Christmas Day. And the French — Ariane Espace — had never worked on Christmas Day in their history. And frankly, it was not me making them work, because I don't believe you can do that. I think people need to themselves figure out that this is important.

And I walked around the room — and this is where my French lessons from Switzerland helped — I went around and thanked them all for working that day. And every one of them — they had taken a union vote to work that day — and every one of them said, we did it for our American colleagues. We can go home that evening and celebrate with our families. We wanted our American colleagues, who spent three months with us here in the rainforest, to be able to do the same. That's why we all worked.

See, when I talk about teamwork, that's what I mean. It's not about getting your own priority as the highest paradigm, but also making sure that your team's priorities are there as well. And you generously offer up your support. When I heard that, I knew we were a team. A team that we'd earned there before.

Now, of course, for me the problem was — normally a launch is 80% of the mission risk, and the deployment and the rest is 20%. In this mission, 20% of the mission risk was launch and 80% was deployment. And as I already told you, you saw the spacecraft was tiny as compared to the total spacecraft, which is, as I said, a tennis court. We needed to go through that unfold sequence.

And we had made a plan, and there was the maximum plan. We told everybody it will take a month longer, and we didn't need a single reserve day until we were ready. And in late January, we had a focused telescope with all 18 mirrors fully focused on one point, so it behaved like a mirror of the 21-foot telescope as if it was made from a single piece of glass.

So before I show you a little bit of that new view of the universe and then engage in the discussion with Kiko, I want to just quickly explain to you why we look back in time. So of course, we look out at the stars. You look up, you see mostly stars of our own Milky Way. You see some planets and you see stars. And the Hubble Space Telescope really imaged those stars around you. I don't know about you, but most of my screen savers on my computers are Hubble images. Right? Galaxies, beautiful things.

And sometimes we forget that the first time we learned that there are other galaxies was at the beginning of the 20th century. We did not know that there were other galaxies before that. And that was discovered.

Now, if you go back in time — by the way, why do you care about galaxies? You're made out of stuff of this galaxy and other stars. Every atom in your body is at least a billion years old. And many of them — their origins we just only learned in the last 10 years. For example, platinum and gold — they come from neutron stars merging. So what I'm having here, pieces of neutron stars on my fingers.

But if you really ask about your history in a long sense, it started 13.8 billion years ago with the beginning of time and space itself — with the Big Bang. And we had not learned anything about these first stars and first galaxies in our history before this telescope. So what we wanted to do is look back in time and see how, out of this kind of ginormous release of energy and space and time itself, did stars suddenly form. And that's what we're going to look at in new ways using an infrared telescope.

So let me show you a few images. And I will start with a friend of yours that I just talked to you about. Galileo looked at Jupiter. You can see it of course with your own eyes. And this is the first infrared image of Jupiter. So you see it's Jupiter because it has that big storm on it, which was discovered almost 100 years after Galileo. But it has been there, and has been changing. Everything in space is changing, and that's going to be a theme you're going to see.

You see all these storms and swirls — it's a very turbulent atmosphere, just like the water as you look out of the ship. You see the turbulent eddies that are happening there. What you also see is that there are polar regions that are really bright. Why are they bright? Because there are particles barreling down from space and heating it up. We can measure that heat right there.

By the way, you also see that Jupiter has a ring. Remember how we always learned Saturn is the only one with the ring? Not the case. Jupiter has a ring. It's a moon that's spitting out gas and basically forming a ring. So this is a first infrared picture of Jupiter. The reason I showed you that is to tell you that the light that was collected had taken 32 minutes to get to the telescope. So I'm going to talk about distance and time. It took 32 minutes. By the way, if you look at the sun outside, the light that hits your eye took off the sun eight and a half minutes or so before that. So this one is 32 minutes.

This one is really exciting — measurement of a first. So besides looking at the early universe, what we also want to look at is something that wasn't even invented or known before when James Webb was started to be conceived, and that is to look at planets around other stars. The first such announcement was in 1995, a year before my PhD. It was theoretical before that.

What you see here is the best image of a Jupiter-type planet in our own galaxy around a star. This was about six times the mass of Jupiter. And you see it's a crude image, but it's an image in different wavelengths, and it's an image that tells you, yes, we can see these exoplanets. And by the way, as you're looking at the stars, what we learned in the last 10 years is, for each star you're looking at, there's at least one planet. In my astrophysics class in the '90s, looking at a star, the question was, how many planets per star? The answer was five to ten percent. So there's ten times more planets than the optimistic people thought during the time when I did my PhD. So that light took a few hundred years to get to us.

The next one is what I would call kind of a celestial hospital. So this is a place where stars die and where stars are born. You see all this kind of brownish stuff — this is the Carina Nebula. It's eight and a half thousand years the light took to get here, again in our own galaxy. All the brownish stuff is stuff that dying stars were ejecting. So think of stars when they're dying — when they're done with their fuel, they're ejecting the outer layers. And in the middle, you see these bright dots that are kind of emerging — those are new stars that are forming, and new planetary systems that are forming right there in our galactic neighborhood. One of the most amazing sights.

What we learned with this telescope already is that there are not only just atoms floating around, like iron and carbon and oxygen, which are what life is made out of, but there are also already a lot of molecules that are way more complex. Molecules that have so much complexity — when I went to school in the '90s, that was impossible in class. It's like, oh, it takes a long, long time to make these molecules, that's really late. No, they're already there, kind of at the end of stars, and they're ejected there.

I want to show you another picture. And before I do so, I just want to remind you — who knows the movie It's a Wonderful Life? Remember how Clarence, I think is his name, comes from the heavens? And it's one of those galaxies that I'm showing you. It's called Stephan's Quintet. Now, if you look at that light — when it took off to come to us, dinosaurs were still on Earth. So something like 200 to 300 million years, that light came to us.

And you see that just like stars going through lives and stars interacting with each other, being merged, galaxies do the same. So beginning of 20th century, we didn't know of a single galaxy. Today, we know there's at least as many galaxies as stars in our own galaxy.

So there's a big trivia question: if you took every grain of sand on Earth and asked, how many stars are there in the universe — are there more grains of sand on Earth, or more stars in the universe? It's absolutely clear now: more stars in the universe. Absolutely clear.

So you look at those galaxies that are interacting with each other, and you see that brownish color again. In fact, gases are colliding with each other, and stars are being ejected.

So I'm going to show you one more image. Before I do so, I want to set it up. Imagine you have one grain of sand on your hand and you stretch it out, and that grain of sand is covering a tiny part of the sky. You go to a really, really dark place somewhere. And what I'm going to do is zoom in. I'm going to zoom in quite a lot, so that particular grain of sand is a really much, much smaller part of the sky than an entire constellation.

And you see it kind of at high resolution — you see it pop up right there. It's a picture of that volume of the sky. And you see in that picture there are in fact — I've counted it — something like 4,000 galaxies in that picture. Covered with one grain of sand in your outstretched arm.

You see two or three stars. You see the things with the big glare — those are stars, foreground stars. So you always know they're from our own galaxy. Everything else are galaxies by themselves. And what I want to show you now is, in that picture, the oldest object that we've ever seen.

It's almost hard to imagine, but we're going to zoom into that little red dot. So that little red dot is right now — and it's being contested already, I want you to know — the oldest galaxy we've ever seen. So that little dot came to be less than half a billion years after the Big Bang. The light that you're looking at was in space, all the way at the speed of light, coming to our telescope for over 13 billion years. And it ended up on our telescope for us to see.

So imagine the immense universe that this telescope reveals. A universe that's much more beautiful than anything we've ever seen. And a universe we can find and unlock by coming together as individuals, thinking about big questions, but equally importantly, building amazing teams that can make those kinds of machines of exploration a reality.

[applause]

And with that, Kiko, I'd like you to come back up.

I tell you what, Thomas. On a boat full of a lot of successful people, you really know how to make us feel small. It's like, almost uncomfortable when you realize just how big our universe is, and how much is out there, and just how small and almost precious what we are doing in this moment.

But I think, kind of focusing on these images — you know, Webb's been there almost a year now, right? What have we — I know we've talked through the pictures, but what are some of the big takeaways for the science community, and what are we hoping to really look forward to in the next couple years as we get more and more data?

So what's really out there are publications and knowledge that was mostly fed by things we knew before. What's really exciting in the next year or two is there's going to be new ideas that are fed by things we didn't know before we launched.

But even now, many of the theories are already crumbling quite severely. So I showed you this picture. We did that just to show whether we can focus on a deep image. We already broke the record for age of a galaxy with that one picture. Which means it's easy to break the record. It's either enormously good luck, but we already know it's easy. So in other words, there are many more early galaxies than we ever thought. So the universe is way more successful building galaxies than we ever thought, and we don't know why.

It could very well be — one of the prevailing theories out there is, we always thought that black holes are at the end of the chain. You start with matter, dark matter, you build galaxies, and then a black hole forms. It could very well be that this is reversed — that black holes come first. So we're already crumbling that theory. We already found, in exoplanets, new gases we've never seen before. And the most important measurements are happening this year.

So there's already a lot of new things that come out. But I would say, a year or two from now is the Nobel Prize caliber stuff. And I would be very disappointed if this doesn't win at least one Nobel Prize. I'm sure it will.

Yeah, the images are spectacular. And I know the science will be as amazing. It's been awesome to see the leap from Hubble to James Webb. I mean, you could compare the same two images — if you guys haven't done that, it's pretty neat, because the sharpness — and by the way, with all of these talks about AI, these are real pictures. Like, these aren't some AI-generated thing. Because your initial reaction when you look at it is like, oh yeah, obviously AI made that. No — the universe made that. And that's a real image.

But I start to wonder: okay, we made this leap from Hubble to Webb. What does this look like 10, 15, 20 years from now? What's the next telescope, and what are we looking for next?

So the next new telescope we haven't started yet is one that I believe should focus on finding life on Earth-like exoplanets. And by the way, that's not just me who believes that — an educated strategy from the top leading astrophysicists done by the National Academies says that is the highest priority.

Now, what I really believe should happen is not that we're doing it the same way. I sat there at the launch, and frankly, the day before, I took a picture with the CEO of Ariane Espace and the guy in charge of Space Transportation at ESA. And I took a picture and said, let's take the picture just so we can say all the jobs that will become free if the launch is not going well. Right? Because every one of us will lose the job, because we have $10 billion sitting on top of one rocket.

I mean, that's insane. It's the ultimate casino. It's the ultimate three minutes of ride or die. You know, it either goes really well or really, really bad. And you know that. And then for me, I visualized the rocket going into water. And I wrote speeches to explain what happened. Because it's a lot easier to deal with risk if you think about it.

So what we want to do in the future is build more like a mountaintop observatory. And in part it's because of the work you and your friends have been doing, which is making launch more affordable. So what we can do is build a telescope which does not have to be that tailored. We build it up there, we build it with robots, build it together, and we go improve it as we go. So we build a really good mirror, but we improve it as we go. And my hope is, in the next 10 to 15 years, we build that. And then we go after really finding life on other planets like the Earth in our own galaxy.

So what do you — I mean, based on the pace of innovation and technology, do you think it's possible we will gain a higher confidence that we're going to find presence of life in the universe within the next 20, 30, 50, 100 years?

I will bet my house on 20.

[applause]

Wow. So in 20 years, I'm talking about life elsewhere, outside of the Earth. By the way, I'm saying that because of the rate of progress we've seen. Of course, there's a number of things I don't know. But what we've really seen is — look, since I indicated, when I took all my astrophysics class — it's really instructive to look at the class notes and see what's wrong today.

So if I looked at what the likelihood was of finding life in the universe in the mid to late '90s, I know it's a thousand times bigger today. And I gave you some of the factors: there's more planets, it's actually easier to make chemicals, it's actually easier to think all these steps are there. There's a number of things I don't know, and of course I may be totally underestimating — sometimes you hit a major hurdle. But if you look at the progress, this is one of the most exciting problems.

And frankly, we're going in like five parallel routes — to Mars, to Titan, to Europa. You're going to launch the Europa Clipper, right? And then there's the exoplanet thing. So we're going in all these parallel things. It's almost like we're on potentially this exponential knee, where all of a sudden our rate of learning and our rate of discovery will be much sooner than we could ever imagine.

I mean, the idea of knowing or finding out that there is life in the universe outside the Earth in my lifetime is honestly something pretty astounding to think about — or the lifetime of most of the people here. So that's very exciting. So we're very thankful for your work on that. Thanks.

I want to switch gears to what it meant to run a team at NASA. So you were one of my favorite professors. You're the first professor that ever gave me honest feedback that I kind of sucked at what I did. And it wasn't just about my grades — I needed to work a little harder. Which was the first time you get feedback, right? In school, the only way you get feedback is your grades. No one actually tells you you're good or not good at a thing.

So Thomas was the first time someone sat me down and said, dude, you're not that great. You got things to improve upon. And you were a hard-charging professor. You started the School of Entrepreneurship. I thought you're going to start a company, and instead here you go diving into a bureaucratic government job. And that's a huge mindset shift.

So what are some of the philosophies — the sort of entrepreneurial mindset you tried to instill when you took over really many thousands of people across the entire country, really across the world? And how did you proliferate that culture — like you mentioned when you talked about James Webb — how did you get that messaging all the way down to the technician? What are some of those philosophies and methods?

Yeah. So I told you where I'm from, right? And what I didn't tell you is that I grew up in an Amish community. So eventually I got ejected from that.

[laughter]

So I'm all about breaking down boundaries. And for me, there's a lot of people who told me I'm not smart enough to go to university. And so I know — when people tell you that, don't listen. Whoever you are, if people tell you you're not smart enough, don't listen. Because that is a really bad feedback, and usually has not worked for anybody.

And so for me, the reason I gave you and everybody else feedback is because I think the biggest tragedy that happens in life, and in organizations too, is that you come towards the end of life and you realize that you were driving a car, metaphorically, and you were driving in the first gear. There were five more gears. You never used them.

And for me, what I really wanted to do — whether it's with you or everybody else, including my NASA team — is to push enough so they go to the next gear. Because once you're in that higher gear, once you realize, well, I can perform more, I can do this, I never thought I could do this — like, we're all, as a community, as a society, we have more potential for solutions. And we need those problem solvers and opportunity recognizers out there going for it.

And for me, it was really important to bring that to NASA. And that is the ultimate entrepreneurial mindset, I believe — recognizing that something that looks impossible is absolutely possible if you work at it, and if you build teams to do so. Even though you don't have all the tools to actually make that happen.

It helped me also understanding how companies work, because so many of my good friends at NASA had never worked in a company. So they didn't actually understand what's possible in a company. But for me, it really was the sense of recognizing that excellence and "very good" are worlds apart. Yes, preach. Yeah. And the fact that individuals can make a huge impact. So let's empower them and let's make it happen.

So one thing that's always fascinated me — you mentioned you had to go get $800 million to finish the telescope, and we spent $10 billion on it, which is an astronomical number to do science. The learning and the fundamental knowledge we gained from science has such value to us as humans in society. But it isn't capitalism, right? I can't pitch a science project the same way I could pitch a company that creates value. And I've always wondered, how do you make these two worlds intersect more in an effort to drive more funding and accelerate our pace of innovation and learning about the universe, or really fundamental science?

Yeah, no, I mean, I think it's both a good question but also a hard one. So I want to just quickly ask, why do we do science? And I think there's at least two reasons to do science, and they're very complementary — they don't exclude each other.

The first one is, science teaches us more about the world, about ourselves, about our history, about our future, about nature. And I don't know about you, but if I look at nature — I go on a mountain, I look down — it feels important. I was in the gym today and I saw two dolphins breaking through the surface and going back down. I'm like, wow, I wish I could follow them down. Because the world that they're in is so different, and I'd like to learn more. And for me, curiosity is a really great driver of science. It's just a wonderful thing.

Science is also providing solutions and opportunities for the future in many ways. The problems we have today — whether it's with our own climate, how we steward our most beautiful planet — many of the solutions come from space. And of course, we didn't think of that when we launched. We wanted to beat the Soviets to the moon — that's why we did that. But the solution space that comes from that — look, if you basically said, what do we know about climate? The vast majority of climate datasets come from space. Whether it's sea level rise, overall temperatures, deforestation. Of course, there's local datasets that really matter, and all climate change is local because that's where action is delivered. But nonetheless, space is so important.

So I think for the future — what are the problems we want to solve? I don't know yet, but science will provide that toolbox. Now, how we bring those together — it's equally hard in business itself, right? If all you're focused on is the next quarter without looking at the future, first of all, we won't have a long business life, generally speaking. So the question really is, how do you bring in large trends? You're working with SpaceX, we're going to talk later. How do you bring that big vision, make that happen in a place where many of the stakeholders are focused on the next quarter? We don't get to the big ideas that way.

So that's why I'm such a champion for small companies taking enormous big leaps, trying to push them into new ground, because they have more opportunity. So for me, the science is important, there's a lot of business opportunities in science, but it's just as important to see this as part of a broader view which is also important in business as we look at it today.

You mentioned Earth observation and the work you did in the agency, and obviously our efforts to understand and help fight climate change. One of my biggest concerns is that when I look at Congress or the House of Representatives, there are very few — maybe one or two of all our elected officials — that have a science or engineering background. Right? So you don't really have that knowledge in the policymakers. How do we manage that? And how did you manage that? And how did you help make sure we create that influence? And I know you have a specific story to share about that after the 2018 election.

Well, so for me, first of all, I really believe that service should be part of the value that we have in our communities. Doing service — for me, when I went to NASA, I took roughly a factor-of-two pay cut. And I was glad for my wife and our family to enable that. It's a smaller house now, but I do service for the government. I was never going to stay there for my whole life, but I wanted to do something for this country which I call my home. So for me, the question I always ask the science community is to revalue service. And of course, you look at where the rewards come from — so often, not enough.

The other piece that's equally important is that we're all voters — those of us who live here. What are you doing to reach out to the elected representatives? I spent a lot of time in offices of elected representatives. And also, the difference between the on-camera persona and behind the camera — and I remember when the first budget came out under the Trump administration, Earth science was slashed.

Right then, I had spent quite a lot of time with both Republicans and Democrats, which is my job. One of the Republicans was a leader of Appropriations in the House. He came up and said, we're not going to do that. In Texas, we need our science, because there's a lot of threats there. Look at the hurricanes that are coming. We're not going to cut Earth science.

And so what happened is, a lot of these cuts never became reality because of support from many others. So for me, discussions with stakeholders matter. It's easy to be sarcastic on the sideline and make everybody discouraged. But it takes courage, I believe, to tackle these problems. And frankly, take a plane to DC and go actually engage with some of these individuals and explain to them why it matters. I think that's really important.

A lot of the people in this room may consider an opportunity in public service later. And at the end of the day, the policy is what's going to drive our ability to let capitalism go to work too on doing the right thing, which I think will be key for climate change.

So I have one last question, because most of us here grew up in the generation where Pluto was a planet. But they've taken it out of the textbooks as a planet. My three-year-old, when I read the books, there's only eight planets. So Thomas, let's settle it right here. Is Pluto a planet?

So I bought a necklace for my wife with all the planets on it, and I said, I want one without Pluto.

[laughter]

Oh, you heard it here first! No, but here's the way — look, I mean, I'm perfectly fine if people want Pluto as a planet. But let's go backwards. If I said today, let's figure out — with everything we know today — what is a planet? Pluto would never be a planet. Because why? There's 50,000 objects out there in the Kuiper Belt, and some of them are bigger than Pluto. Pluto was just the first one we discovered. So are they all planets? But they're small planets that are out there. They're a really important part of the history. And frankly, the outer solar system is full of these objects.

But the point is, if you knew what we know today, you would not have called it a planet. But I have zero problem if people want to call it a planet. But for me, as the head of science, I cannot.

Totally fair. Okay, awesome!

Hey, so we got 12 minutes left, and I figured we would open it up to the audience for some questions. You've got your hand out there right now, so why don't you — hopefully we can hear you.

Crazy facts — well, I'll start with my rings. So I already told you, most of the gold and most of the platinum is formed in one specific type of stars — neutron stars. We actually thought that they're coming from explosions of stars. We proved in the meantime it's not the case. We've only discovered one merger of two neutron stars. We discovered it by ripples of space — gravitational waves — and just by accident, we managed to look at it with a gamma ray telescope. And we found lines of gold and platinum. That basically tells us that this theory, which was a minor theory, is in fact correct. So that's one of the facts.

The other one I mentioned I want to reiterate: for every star in our own galaxy, there's something like 400 billion stars. There's a galaxy by itself. And remember, 100 years ago, not one other galaxy was known. My guess is that number will go up. So we may have, instead of similar numbers — when I did my PhD, it was a big question, how many grains of sand on our beaches, and the stars looked roughly the same — it may be a hundred times more stars.

The third fact I want to tell you — I did not talk about this — is we know with 100% certainty that we only understand 5% of the energy in the universe. So 5% is matter — like you and I are made out of, and things we can detect in the lab, like neutrinos. Roughly another 20% or so is what we call dark matter. We know it's there because it bends light, it changes the orbit of stars and galaxies. But we don't know what it is.

And the rest is dark energy. It's actually so strong that it accelerates the expansion of the universe. When I went to school, the only two solutions we looked at were universes that collapsed on themselves, or ones that stayed the same. This one, the universe we're living in, is one that's accelerating, driven by energy we don't understand. And so we now only know 5% of the energy in our universe. And that is quite concerning.

Sure, let's go right here.

So he's asking how the color that we see — is it a color photograph? So we're struggling with that, right? So here's the problem: your eyes, again, if you stood in front of it, you would not see it. You would only see the stars because they have an optical counterpart. So what we're doing is, in each one of those images, when we're deciding how to color them, we actually hire artists, first of all. People who really know. And we talk a lot about the science of it. And I want to tell you, I love working with artists. Some of the best ideas I got from artists. Art is a good way of perceiving the world.

So what we're doing then is coming up with color scales that are like you would guess — so blue is higher energy than red. But the way we're setting it is to color the whole range that the particular telescope has. So it's physically correct in that sense, but it's false color because your eye will not see it that way. So there is artistic interpretation in the sense that the allocation of color to a given wavelength range is decided by somebody — actually decided by a handful of artists that work together with scientists. And we try to do it as honestly as possible, so at the end, your impression of it is correct scientifically. We go back and forth until we're in sync. So we're not trying to fake you into believing something that's not there, but trying to be as trustworthy as possible, recognizing that your eyes don't see it.

Big question. Yeah, right there.

Your question is: you're head of NASA, 20 years from now we discovered life, what happens next? What are some of the tactical steps that you can take?

So first of all, I think it would be one of the most exciting times in science, overall, in many ways. It's straight-up for humanity, because it's a Copernican revolution of the next kind. That's the dream you always have — breaking through a major wall of ignorance.

Our gut feeling was always that there are planets out there. We found them in '95 for the first time. Now we know every star has a planet. So that transition from a chemical, physical world to a biological world — I think it would spur a whole new wave of innovation, the likes of which are really hard to predict. Because perhaps the right medicines for us are in different life forms elsewhere, right? Ways that, with our DNA-based life — the one life that we have — we cannot reach.

For me, what I would really want to do is get the maximum knowledge out of it right away from both sides. Remember, when you look at the future, hope and fear are always close to each other. The same is true with this one. You'd want to make sure that you understand the fear side and the hope side. So I really want to make sure I go after both, and understand in what way would that life interact with us.

Remember, what I'm talking about is microbial life. I did not talk about intelligent life, which is a lot harder to predict. But for me, I would like to be science director in 20 years, because it's the most fruitful — really, a new book opens up for exploration. I'd like to go after it with everything I have. Not as an agency, as a person, but as a world. And really say, what are the opportunities that are there?

Besides finding life, what discoveries within the next 10 or 20 years do you think have the potential of changing both our culture and our understanding of the universe?

This one is the biggest, right? It's shining so bright I'm trying to focus my eyes on something else. Well, look, I do believe — so what I'm spending time on right now, mostly, is trying to figure out the big challenges that we have today that could really change humanity. The one that I'm focused a lot on is the health of our own planet.

And the question really is, in the toolbox of everything that's available, what are the tools — including the ones that come from space — that could help us be more aware of what's happening on Earth, but also really almost create an exoskeleton in space for our own planet? A support system for our own planet.

So for me, that's a big idea. What I'd really like to do is almost in a near-real-time sense — not the way weather comes down — I'd like to inform you about decisions that you're making and how it's affecting things around you. So often we think of climate as something that is not affecting us. Okay, not last year. Since 2020, there were two 500-year floods in Florida. 500-year floods are defined by the statistics of the past and are used for insurance purposes.

Florida — as someone who lives in Florida, you know it — 9% of all the properties in the United States' insurance is in Florida. 74% of all claims last year were in Florida. So now you say, well, climate is not affecting us? It's affecting us today.

So I haven't figured out yet — and I don't think there are good ideas out there, many of them in the entrepreneurial world — I'm really excited about Planet Labs, for example, Spire and other companies that are really saying, hey, we want to provide that information near real-time. So deforestation somewhere else is recognized and can be taken into account. So that's a second idea, really — that exoskeletal support of our planet in space.

So we're almost out of time. Thomas, any last thoughts you want to leave this group of entrepreneurs and creatives and people that just want to go change the world?

Well, look, I really am excited to be here with you, because you inspire me in many ways. The ideas that you have, whether you're artists or people who care deeply for others, or build companies — what brings us forward. And in many ways, it's the same force that creates telescopes like this. And so, for me, recognizing that at the end, it's basically humans that do it.

Perhaps one of the hardest lessons I learned — I went into NASA science, and I thought 70% of all problems that I'm going to solve are technology, and 30% are going to be people. Reversed. 70% of all problems I solved were people problems — team problems, imagination of what is the scope in which we're thinking. And technology will figure out eventually.

So for me, what I really believe in, and what I'm so excited about here with all of you, is: I just really do not accept those boundaries that are ahead of you. And recognize that the world of possibilities is much bigger than the world of reality that we live in today.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Thomas.

[applause]