Michelle Thaller — Astrophysicist and longtime NASA science communicator who hosted launch events and served as a public spokesperson. Now retired, she gives popular astronomy talks and is starting to build a YouTube/social media presence as Dr. Michelle Thaller.
The gist
Joe Rogan and astrophysicist Michelle Thaller spend the conversation exploring the scale and strangeness of the universe, from the size of the Milky Way to exoplanet detection via spectroscopy. Thaller explains how NASA measures the bending of space and time around black holes and neutron stars, how GPS satellites prove relativity daily, and how gravitational-wave detectors like LIGO catch ripples thousands of times smaller than an atomic nucleus. The two range into quantum entanglement, the multiverse, the Big Bang, and what may have come before it, repeatedly hitting the edge of where physics 'gives up.' They also venture into philosophy and futurism, discussing AI as humanity's possible successor, the search for meaning beyond work, and the value of scientific humility. The episode closes on psychedelics, consciousness, grief, and the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample that contained the building blocks of DNA.
Big reveals
- Helium was discovered on the Sun in 1868, decades before it was ever found on Earth.
- Clocks are now so accurate that time can be measured flowing differently between your head and your feet.
- Quantum entanglement is a proven experimental fact: change one electron's spin and its partner responds instantly at any distance.
- The Event Horizon Telescope linked observatories worldwide to build a planet-sized telescope and image a black hole's shadow.
- LIGO detected gravitational waves from two black holes colliding millions of light-years away, ripples smaller than an atomic nucleus.
- Thaller reveals she went to the White House to help make psychedelics available for veterans and first responders.
- NASA had to reprogram the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to be autonomous after launch to land on asteroid Bennu.
- The OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample contained all the nucleobases of DNA and RNA, evidence life's building blocks rain from space.
Things worth remembering
- You could fit over a million Earths inside the Sun; if the Sun were the dot of an 'i' on a page, the Milky Way would be bigger than the Earth.
- Titan has lakes and rivers of liquid methane and ethane, and NASA's Dragonfly octocopter is set to explore it.
- Venus's surface is about 1,000 degrees with sulfuric-acid clouds and pressure like being a mile under the ocean.
- An astronaut on the space station for a year returns about 1/100 of a second younger than they should be.
- A teaspoon of neutron-star material would weigh about as much as Mount Everest.
- Physics still cannot describe the interior of neutron stars or black holes; the equations break down.
- The cosmic microwave background was nearly mistaken for noise from pigeons nesting in a Bell Labs telescope.
- DMT, the most potent known psychedelic, is produced naturally by the human body in the liver and lungs.
- Quantum computers solve in minutes problems a universe-sized classical computer couldn't finish before heat death.