The guest
Konstantin Batygin: Planetary astrophysicist at Caltech and a leading proponent of the Planet Nine hypothesis. With collaborator Mike Brown he argued that clustered orbits of distant Kuiper Belt objects point to an unseen distant planet about five Earth masses.
What this episode covers
Batygin walks through the architecture of our solar system, from the inner rocky planets to Jupiter and Saturn out to the Kuiper Belt and the vast, nearly spherical Oort Cloud that stretches halfway to the nearest star. He lays out the evidence for Planet Nine: a hypothesized five-Earth-mass body on a 10,000-year orbit, inferred from the way distant icy objects cluster and tilt rather than from any direct image. The conversation explores how planets form, why Earth and the solar system are roughly a one-percent outcome, the chaos of three-body dynamics, and why full simulations of the solar system would be cool but scientifically useless. It ranges into primordial black holes, the interstellar visitor 'Oumuamua, alien junk, the value of useless knowledge, and Batygin's life as a Russian-born immigrant, musician, and scientist.
Recommended on this episode
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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Bethesda
“the graphics is like wow i want to stay there”
“there's a game called uh skyrim it's an elder scrolls role playing game and i just uh i played it for quite a bit”— Lex Fridman
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The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
CD Projekt Red
“the third like witcher game was astonishingly beautiful”
“the the third like witcher game was astonishingly beautiful right especially like playing on on a good hardware machine”— Konstantin Batygin
BookRecommended
The Black Cloud
Fred Hoyle
“it's something worth checking out”
“you know about the black clouds book i think this by fred hoyle this is like this has great connections with sort of a lot of the advancements”— Konstantin Batygin
MediaRecommended
What's My Age Again?
Blink-182
“it's a good song”
“my choice would be probably what's my age again by blink 182. it's just you know it's a solid one”— Konstantin Batygin
MediaRecommended
Strawberry Fields Forever
The Beatles
“one of my favorite beetle songs”
“like straw i think strawberry feels forever is is one you know what what one of my favorite beetle songs”— Konstantin Batygin
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In My Life
The Beatles
“one of the most uh introspective pieces of music ever”
“one of my favorite beetle songs is it's uh you know in my life right that's it's it's hard to imagine how whatever 24 year old wrote that”— Konstantin Batygin
MediaRecommended
The Dark Side of the Moon
Pink Floyd
“getting pretty close up there to the pinnacle of what you know can be created”
“you can sort of look at the entire dark side of the moon album and getting pretty close up there to the pinnacle of what can be created”— Konstantin Batygin
MediaRecommended
The Wall
Pink Floyd
“transporting you into another place songs don't not many songs could do that”
“you have that with the wall of just uh transporting you into another place songs don't not many songs could do that”— Lex Fridman
MediaRecommended
Hurt (Johnny Cash cover)
Johnny Cash
“one of the greatest songs of all time”
“i would say output johnny cash's cover of hurt as one of the greatest songs of all time”— Lex Fridman
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
MediaReferenced
World of Warcraft
Blizzard Entertainment
“i just recently saw that wow and fortnite were played 140 billion hours and those are just video games”— Lex Fridman
MediaReferenced
Fortnite
Epic Games
“i just recently saw that wow and fortnite were played 140 billion hours and those are just video games”— Lex Fridman
ProductReferenced
PlayStation 4
Sony
“some of the video games like on the ps4 yeah like look pretty real to me yeah right”— Konstantin Batygin
MediaReferenced
Ace Combat 7
Bandai Namco
“ace combat seven that's a great example right like i mean the way that the clouds are rendered uh it's i mean it looks just like when you're flying”— Konstantin Batygin
MediaReferenced
Red Dead Redemption
Rockstar Games
“you can play uh what is it red dead red dead redemption redemption and uh you can ride horses in the video game”— Lex Fridman
ProductReferenced
Tesla Roadster
Tesla
“there's also a tesla roadster out there uh that that one it will never leave the solar system it'll just i think that one will eventually collide with mars”— Konstantin Batygin
ProductReferenced
AlphaFold 2
DeepMind
“with the alpha fold two we're now trying we're now starting to crack open biology so being able to simulate at first trivial biological systems”— Lex Fridman
MediaReferenced
Arrival
Denis Villeneuve
“stephen wolfram looked at this with the movie arrival it's like what would be the common language that we would discover”— Lex Fridman
ProductReferenced
Pepsi
PepsiCo
“constantine was uh talking about basically his first in 1992 interaction with capitalism which is pepsi and at first he discovered pepsi”— Lex Fridman
ProductReferenced
Big Mac
McDonald's
“i'm just taking a bite out of that big mac like wow”— Konstantin Batygin
BookReferencedISBN verified
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams
“let me leave you with some words from douglas adams in the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy far out in the uncharted backwaters”— Lex Fridman
Big reveals from this episode
- Batygin says the false-alarm probability of the Kuiper Belt clustering behind Planet Nine is about 0.4 percent under their preferred statistical analysis.
- He argues the solar system likely once had a compact system of inner planets that Jupiter's primordial migration destroyed before Earth formed.
- He states that the three-body problem is chaotic, so simulating the whole solar system from scratch would be a futile pursuit for prediction.
- Batygin recounts deriving the Schrodinger equation from gravitating concentric rings, noting the equation is a wave equation with nothing inherently quantum about it.
- He entertains that Planet Nine could be a five-Earth-mass primordial black hole rather than a planet, since gravity alone cannot distinguish them.
- He favors the theory that 'Oumuamua is a hydrogen-ice iceberg from a giant molecular cloud, explaining its shape and acceleration.
- Batygin says he would not want to die on Mars and pushes back on Mars as a safe-haven, calling living there worse than camping in the Mojave.
- He notes his academic advisor's advisor's advisor lacked a PhD and Faraday derived his law from intuition without knowing algebra.
Worth remembering
- Pluto's surface area is almost exactly equal to the surface area of Russia, yet it is roughly 500 times less massive than Earth.
- A distant Kuiper Belt object central to the Planet Nine story is nicknamed Biden (VP113) because Joe Biden was vice president when it was found.
- The Oort Cloud is so vast it ends roughly halfway between the Sun and the next star, defined by how far solar gravity reaches.
- The outer solar system is essentially collisionless; Batygin guesses there have been zero collisions in the Oort Cloud over the solar system's age.
- Jupiter-and-Saturn-like planet pairs are found around only about 10 percent of Sun-like stars, making our configuration relatively rare.
- Aluminum-26 in meteorites shows the solar system formed in a cluster of thousands of stars, some of which went supernova.
- New Horizons revealed Pluto has flowing glaciers made of carbon-monoxide ice, since water ice behaves like metal at 40 Kelvin.
- Batygin praises the book on the usefulness of useless knowledge by the founder of the Institute for Advanced Study.
- He notes a few percent of the entire electrical grid went to mining Bitcoin, raising the question of what computation looks like from space.
- Batygin describes standing in line about six hours for Moscow's first McDonald's and marveling at the sesame seeds on the bun.
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