Space Lasers, Solar Panels and Stochastic Parrots with Leah Voytovich

How far can following your passions take you in science? To find out, Dr. Charles Liu and co-host Allen Liu welcome the multi-faceted Leah Voytovich, a software development engineer for Project Kuiper who planned on going to med school but instead ended up working on space lasers for Amazon’s satellite internet constellation.

As always, though, we start off with the day’s joyfully cool cosmic thing: the use of deuterium levels in the search for exoplanets with advanced civilizations. That’s because signs of deuterium depletion can indicate that a planet has developed nuclear fission power. 

After that, Leah tells us a little about Amazon’s Project Kuiper. She explains the wide variety of challenges to keeping the satellites, which are in low earth orbit, in communication with the ground. The project she’s working on now is using infrared space lasers to communicate more securely within the satellite constellation. 

Chuck brings up the impact that these massive groups of satellites like Starlink are having on astronomy, from satellite streaks on dark sky surveys to image-destroying flares. Leah said there are people working on reducing Project Kuiper’s impacts across multiple areas of concern.

For our first question. Yasmin asks, “Will our satellites all be controlled by AI someday? If so, when? And is this a good idea?” 

Leah speculates that there may be some projects already using Machine Learning here on Earth, but that it will be further down the line before there’s AI actually present in satellites themselves. Leah doesn’t see a problem with the use of ML tools for science, as long as there are protections in place and that humans are still writing the software.

After our break, Leah tells us about what she does outside her work – literally – from climbing Mount St. Helens in winter using an ice ax and crampons, to skiing, to running marathons – 3 so far!

Then we’re back to AI, ML, and the differences between the two. Charles talks about how important AI has beome as a tool for astronomers and other scientists. Leah explains the “Chinese Room Argument” and why it’s a good analogy for machine learning, Allen shares the description of AI as a “stochastic parrot.” 

Our next question comes from Jonathan, who asks, “With so many problems facing the world like poverty, war and the climate crisis here on Earth, why should we spend money and resources on space exploration and astronomy?”

Leah talks about how Project Kuiper is intended to serve underserved communities by providing internet access to people who don’t already have it. That in turn increases global communication and connectivity and can then help address those other problems. And of course, to launch those satellites, we need rockets.

She also explains how valuable internet access is to communities– something she knows a little about. She and Martin Leet co-founded Maji, a nonprofit in Uganda that uses solar power to make clean water easily accessible for refugee communities. Leah, a former EMT, explains how Maji also provides first aide medical training and agricultural training to the communities. The story of how Maji came to be is remarkable – we’ll leave it to Leah to share that with you in the episode.

We end with Leah recounting what it was like to be in Mission Control for the launch of the first Project Kuiper satellites. She was the representative for her team in the Mission Control room, so she was the one who actually got to say “Go” for her service during the final pre-launch Go/No Go review. 

If you’d like to know more about Maji, you can check out the nonprofit’s website here.

We hope you enjoy this episode of The LIUniverse, and, if you do, please support us on Patreon.

Credits for Images Used in this Episode:

Illustration of Kepler-138 exoplanets– NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI) Deuterium, aka hydrogen-2 (²H or D) – Center for Deuterium Depletion An axonometric view displays various Earth orbits, illustrating space debris and active satellites – WikiCommons/Pablo Carlos Budassi The history of the universe since the Big Bang – NASA Satellite streaks in an astronomical image – University of Washington/ Abhilash Biswas, Kilando Chambers, and Ashley Santos Space-based lasers – IEEE Spectrum Illustration of NASA’s Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) communicating with the I.S.S. over laser links – NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Illustration of machine learning and artificial intelligence – Creative Commons / mikemacmarketing Computer simulation of dendrites of pyramidal neurons – Hermann Cuntz/ PLoS Computational Biology, Vol. 6(8) August 2010. Earth illuminated time-lapse video if ISS over Earth – NASA Martin Leet and Leah Voytovich – University of Pennsylvania The Maji water tank for the Olua I community – University of Pennsylvania/Martin Leet