00:29:49 · Will Marshall
[00:29:49] S1: Yeah. I mean, funny objects, trying to look at flying objects, flying devices, what have you, anomalous stuff. Now, most of it, there isn't really. I'm sad because actually the interesting backdrop is that the universe is remarkably silent. We haven't seen any aliens yet, and that's shocking. My co founder worked on a mission called TESS at NASA, which was looking at other planets around nearby star systems. So we've now discovered over 6,300 planets all around in the local galactic neighborhood, and none of them have any obvious signs of life yet. And now we're still looking, but in many ways the universe is eerily silent. And this is what Enrico Fermi called the... We now call the Fermi Paradox after his question, which is basically, what gives? How come there's so many planets, the universe is so big, and we still haven't heard from the aliens? This is a big question. I predict that we'll actually find life off Earth within the next ten years. Actually, I predicted that a few years ago, so now it's probably more like And six or the reason is we're going to look at all those planets and look at their atmospheres with the modern best telescopes we have on the earth and the James Webb telescope. We can actually tell chemical signatures doing what we do with our Tanager satellite, but looking out. And with that, we should be able to see certain signs of the atmosphere that might be indications of life. Like if you looked at the earth, you'd you see 20% oxygen in the atmosphere. That's a dead giveaway because oxygen grabs onto anything. It oxidizes iron. It oxidizes everything. The only reason we have all this abundance is because life keeps on... All the plants keep on pushing all that up. If we saw anything like that, we would go, that planet probably has life. We won't be certain. We haven't seen the picture of the alien yet, but we would go, that is anomalous. We haven't done that yet, but with all that survey, I think we'll probably find it. But still, that could be life that's not intelligent. We would expect to see radio waves from these things, and we've looked at most of those kind of things, and there isn't. We haven't seen any obvious signs of technology or technological life. And so that's rather worrying because one possibility is that we get to technology stages and then we blow ourselves up.
00:32:20 · Will Marshall, Molly O'Shea
You know, people seriously worry about this. Like, we've got nukes. We're sort of getting through that. Now we've got AI. Scary. Obviously, amazing upside potential like we were talking about, but also brings real risks as we saw with recent hacking events and other things. AI could help terrorists build bad things, and we've got real risks of AI. And then there's the whole control thing. Can we even control it? We don't know that the reason it's eerily silent is actually because they blow themselves up when they get to this stage. Hopefully not, but this is why what we do right now with taking care of planet Earth or as I call it, spaceship Earth. Because we're all on a spaceship, 8,000,000,000 of us, like Buckminster Fuller, observed. And it's the only place that there is life that we know yet. Maybe there's other places, but so far, it's the only one. Therefore, our responsibility to take care of it and not blow it up is like not just locally important, it's cosmically important. It's our cosmic duty to take care of the earth. And so in short answer, no, we haven't seen any aliens, but that makes our role here even more important. [00:33:34] S0: Question. Are there any conspiracy theories we should be paying attention to? [00:33:40] S1: I'm not a big, I mean, you're talking to a scientist here. [00:33:43] S0: Okay. [00:33:43] S1: Most of that, my friend at NASA used to run the hotline for aliens and 90 something percent. The [00:33:52] S0: hotline for aliens? Basically. Like if the aliens would call? No,
00:33:52 · Molly O'Shea, Will Marshall
[00:33:52] S0: hotline for aliens? Basically. Like if the aliens would call? No, [00:33:55] S1: no, not the aliens. No, the people calling thinking they've seen aliens. [00:33:59] S0: Oh gosh. Is what [00:34:01] S1: I meant. Or the fruitcake line, as he would call it. Because most of it, unfortunately, isn't real. It's like most of it's people observing Venus and not realizing that it's Venus. Over 90% is that one use case, by the way. So unfortunately, most of these things have very similar explanations and even the ones that we can't explain, and there are definitely some that we can't explain, the chances of it being aliens are really low. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and we haven't got that, but it's fun to think about aliens in our galactic neighborhood, and I think, again, in the next few years, we might see some. [00:34:38] S0: Do you have any particular sci fi movies or books that you like? [00:34:41] S1: Well, I like Star Trek. Like, probably my favorite is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which was made into a film, but the best is the radio series original, which is, I mean, those guys sometimes were drunk doing this radio, but they were amazingly funny. And that's why, yeah, my favorite numbers, 42, The Answer to the Life of the Universe and everything and all the rest of it.
00:34:41 · Will Marshall, Molly O'Shea
[00:34:41] S1: Well, I like Star Trek. Like, probably my favorite is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which was made into a film, but the best is the radio series original, which is, I mean, those guys sometimes were drunk doing this radio, but they were amazingly funny. And that's why, yeah, my favorite numbers, 42, The Answer to the Life of the Universe and everything and all the rest of it. [00:35:05] S0: Amazing. Okay, so as we close out, I'm going to ask our partner a question. So our partner is Brex, Spending Sparter, Moving Faster, they're corporate agentic finance platform. They're super intelligent because that's what we call it now, super intelligence. So in terms of the topic of performance, I like to take in this in more of like a personal bend. Like people say you're a culmination of the five people you surround yourself with or people that inspire you or mentor you. So I'm curious who is that person or people for you?
00:35:38 · Will Marshall
[00:35:38] S1: When I was a kid, I was really inspired by an astronomer in England called Patrick Moore, who I got to meet. He's a bit like the Carl Sagan of England. And I was young building telescopes, not so different from these. It's just on the ground pointing up, not in space pointing down. So one of my teachers took me to meet him and he was like a god to me. And I was like, Oh my god, we're going to see Patrick Moore. So he became a bit of a mentor, but I've been lucky to have many mentors that I look up to. I did my PhD very fortuitously with Roger Penrose, who's a mathematical cosmologist, but he doesn't limit himself even to that. I was doing stuff with him on physics, but he also has ideas about consciousness. He speculates. He does amazing stuff in mathematics. Like he came up with these Penrose tiling. He made contributions in cosmology. He actually helped to prove that singularities could really exist in practice like stars could collapse into a black hole. The theory was clear from Einstein, but he actually proved that a non symmetric star could eventually be a black hole. So in practice, and that also means that there could be the end of time if the end of the universe collapses. We don't think we're in that scenario. We think we're going to continue expanding now. But anyway, really interesting mathematics. And I mean, when you meet people like that, it's just I'm inspired by the genius. I mean, these guys are totally different playing field, and it's very humbling. He at 70, when I was doing my PhD, was running rings around all of the rest of the professors and of course me as a student who's probably come in half hangover from the night before and this guy is going, know, talking about string theory and cosmology and all the rest of it. And it's humbling to see genius, basically. And so I've been very lucky with mentors like that through my career. When I was at NASA, I had Pete Worden, who, was a sort of maverick in the space industry. He was in the US Air Force. Then he went to NASA to run the NASA Center that I worked at And, we argued a lot, but I learned a huge amount from this guy and he really gave us a shield at NASA to do innovative things. And that's where we started with this. Let's throw some phones into space and see if they worked, which by the way, is what led to all of this.
00:38:16 · Will Marshall, Molly O'Shea
And so we're very, sort of brings us right back to where we, where we began. [00:38:21] S0: I guess to distill that down, what is the key lesson that you've learned through building the company throughout the years, going public, launching more into space? [00:38:30] S1: Well, people say startups are all about timing, and the best idea, and of course those things are obviously important, But I'd say persistence and endurance is the biggest thing that actually distinguishes entrepreneurs that succeed and don't. Our team has been at this for years and we knew that we were on a mission that was really important to help the planet. Security, sustainability, AI, all the things that we can envision, how it can help us. And we weren't going to stop, just because some VC said, No, you can't. That's crazy. No one's ever launched that many satellites. No one's ever, you know, whatever. And, that determination, that grit is what keeps and that inspiration of helping the planet is making the best positive contribution with these tools is what keeps us going every day. And I'm so proud on our tenth anniversary that seven of the first 10 employees of Planet were still working at Planet. Wow. And we just had our fifteenth anniversary, and there's still about half of the first 10 are still at Planet. That says a huge amount, right? They could probably work anywhere, these guys, the incredible skills, but they choose to continue to work at Planet because they think the mission's cool, they're doing amazing, they get to work on satellites every day, and who doesn't like that?