Becoming Wise is supported by the Fetzer Institute.

I've had hundreds of big conversations, and my conversation partners share wisdom I carry with me wherever I go.

The astronomer Natalie Battaglia embodies a planetary sense of what love is and means. She has

searched the universe for exoplanets, earth-like bodies beyond our solar system that could harbor

liquid water and life. And she's so warm and joyful as she takes this work into her life as a human on Earth.

This is becoming wise. I'm Krista Tippett.

So, I mean, here's a way you've written about, just some languages you've used.

What we observe out there is that nature is creative, prolific, robust.

I mean, you also bring words like love.

It's not that you're confusing these things with your science or conflating them.

But I sense that this life of discovery that you're involved in does bring you back to think about something like love differently,

that it informs and somehow fuses your thinking about that. So talk to me about that. Yeah. This has been a surprise to me, actually, that my perspective

on love has been so informed by science, but it has. It's been fundamentally shifted. And then I read

other scientists who've had the same perspective, and it all kind of makes sense. I mean, it's been fundamentally shifted. And then I read other scientists who've had the same perspective and it all kind of makes

sense.

I mean, Carl Sagan's quote, you know, for small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable

only through love, you know.

And this, you know, love, this idea is this moving force.

I mean, it just permeates our history, our

culture. I've equated it to, you know, this analogy of dark matter, you know, 95% of the mass

of the universe being something we can't even see. And yet it moves us, it draws us, it creates

galaxies. We're like moving on a

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