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Without further ado, here's Professor Richard Dawkins and Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson.

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Well, Neil, we're here to talk about the poetry of science. I would say that science is the

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poetry of reality, and one of the things that I feel a bit humble in your presence, biology

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being a kind of junior science to physics, I suppose we both have something to learn

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from each other; but I can't help feeling I've got rather more to learn from you than

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you've got to learn from me. Maybe we're both a bit naïve about each other's subject, but

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I think I'm a bit more naïve about yours because there's more to be naïve about.

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I forget who it was that coined the phrase “physics envy,” and I think this shows

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itself in lots of fields, perhaps less so in biology than others, so what we're going

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to try to do is to have a conversation between a biologist, an evolutionary biologist and

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an astrophysicist, a kind of mutual tutorial without a chairman to get in the way.

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I thought we might begin by noting that what we can see with our sense organs is an extremely

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narrow band of what there is to see, and this is particularly so with the visual sense.

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We can see a tiny, narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum, the rainbow; but the rainbow's width

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is tiny compared to the vast expanse of the electromagnetic spectrum.

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I see that as a kind of symbol for how limited our understanding of the universe is, as well,

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because after all, we are evolved beings who evolved to understand the interactions between

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medium-sized objects moving at medium speeds. And this ill equipped our brains to understand

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the very small quantum theory and the very large, which I supposed is covered by relativity.

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So, I find myself, as a mere biologist, baffled by some of the things that physicists talk

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about, and jut to throw out one example, in the expanding universe, we are told (and I

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have to believe it) that everywhere is as it were the same as everywhere else. There's

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no one place which is the edge of the universe. How can that be?

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Well, Richard, first of all, you're told it so you have to believe it. I will never require

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you to believe anything.

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Good for you.

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It will only ever be about how compelling is the evidence to you, but you started with

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our sensory organs and landed in the expanding universe. Can I take us back to the organs

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and then, perhaps, land in the universe?

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Yes.

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The urge to think of our senses as being powerful or good is strong because, first, that's all

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we have; second, we like having nice thoughts about ourselves, rather than miserable, depressing

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thoughts, so we're prone to talk around celebrating, for example the power of sight or of taste

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or of smell, when of course, when you really smell something, you bring a dog, and they

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smell...their nose smells much better than your nose smells. I was going to say the dog

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smells better than you, but that would insult you.

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So, we already know that our sense are feeble, and we reach to other creatures in the animal

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kingdom, cite them as having better examples of our sight, of our taste, of our smell;

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but little did people know much before a century and a half ago that our sense of vision is

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limited only, as Richard said, to the colors of the rainbow, and it's quite extraordinary

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to realize that, for example, beyond red, there's something called infrared; and beyond

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infrared, there are microwaves. And beyond microwaves, there are radio waves.

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Go the other direction, you go beyond violet, ultraviolet. Beyond that, x-rays and gamma

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rays. Energy goes up as you approach gamma rays, with dramatic consequences if you have

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gamma-ray exposure, by the way. Of course, we all know you turn big, green, and ugly

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as The Hulk had experienced. But the point is the visible light part of that spectrum

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is a tiny slice, and the universe doesn't only communicate with us through that slice,

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as we had taken for granted for so long.

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Most of the history of the telescope, which is itself an extension of our eyes, extended

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the power of our eyes but not the range of our eyes. It wasn't until we first understood

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that maybe we're missing something in the 19th century, the 20th century came decade

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by decade, new telescopes in each newly-discovered band of light. Only then did we learn about

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black holes in the universe or remarkable violent forces operating in the centers of

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galaxies, discovered by radio telescopes.

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So, yeah, we're practically blind out there, and it's humbling, by the way, but that's

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the whole point of the methods and tools of science, to not only extend your senses in

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the domain in which you understand, but to take them to places they've never been before.

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On top of that, we have methods and tools that detect things that are not even extensions

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of your senses. You have no clue what the magnetic field is around your body right now.

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You have no clue whether or not you're being bathed in ionizing radiation right now. You'll

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eventually figure that out, as limbs start falling off; but while it's happening, you

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actually don't know.

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There are other things that are more subtle like polarization of light. So when I think

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of the scientist's tool kit, especially the astrophysicist's tool kit, it's all about

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how many different senses can you bring to bear, technological senses can you bring to

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bear on decoding the universe.

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One of the things we have discovered, now getting to your horizon question, we look

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around the universe, and it looks like we're in the center. What an ego-supporting concept

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that is! You can either go around continuing to think that, feeling good about yourself,

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or study the problem and learn that, in an expanding universe, where the speed of light

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is finite at 186,000 miles per second...forgive me using miles per second...

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I'd prefer miles.

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You do. You got that on tape? An Oxford professor, I prefer...

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No, it's true. Nobody talks about kilometers in Britain.

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Oh, good. All right. We share not only most of our language, we share miles still. And

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inchworms. What do they call them? They're not centimeter worms, right? They're inchworms.

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We don't have that sort of stuff in Britain. That's Europe.

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Of course, Britain is not Europe, as we are constantly reminded. That's right, here we

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have the English breakfast and the Continental breakfast. They're very different breakfasts

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that you can order here.

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So, this horizon problem is actually quite simple; and rather than explain the full up

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nature of it, let me just give a simple example that is entirely analogous. When you're a

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ship at sea, and you look out, your horizon in every direction is the same distance from

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you. It depends on your height above the sea level. That's why ship decks are high. They

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see farther beyond the curvature of the earth than you do just standing on the main deck.

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So, your horizon is a perfect circle centered on you. You can conclude that is the extent

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of the entire earth, or you can imagine, suppose I'm in another spot. Well, that horizon is

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still true for whoever happens to be in the middle of it, but now, you've moved to a new

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place, and you will see a horizon corresponding with that spot.

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So, everybody has a horizon at sea; yet no one at any time is thinking that that's the

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full extent of the ocean or the full extent of the earth. We have a horizon in the universe,

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so does the Andromeda Galaxy, the galaxies with names that look like phone numbers. If

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you travel to those galaxies, they will see the edge of the universe now in three dimensions

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in every direction at the same distance from them, just as we see for ourselves.

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That does it for me, provided that the horizon is that which we are capable of seeing. I

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could follow that if you said that, for any part of the universe, the horizon is the bit

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before the expending universe has disappeared over the horizon.

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Yes.

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It's just no longer visible, but it's still there, even though we can't detect it.

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That's true of the ocean when you're at sea.

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Yeah, but...anybody on my side here?

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You want it to be a harder problem than it is. I'm just simply saying... So, here you

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go. Here you go.

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The radius to our horizon is about 14 billion light years.

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Got it.

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Okay? If we sat here or returned to this spot a billion years from now, that horizon will

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be 15 billion light years away. It's actually an expanding horizon because the light from

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15 billion years, light years away, will have had time to reach us. Right now, it's still

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en route.

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I have no problem with that, but beyond the 14 billion year...

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The problem is the universe wasn't born yet.

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Yes, okay.

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That's the problem.

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I know.

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Okay? So, you can't see the universe before it existed.

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So why doesn't somebody...

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...invent the kind of telescope that can?

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No, no, no. Okay, I'm getting out of my depth here. Let's get back to...

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Just to clarify. It takes light time to reach us, and the universe hasn't been here forever.

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You combine those two facts, you get an edge of the universe. And so, the universe has

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been here for 14 billion years. The farthest thing that could send us any information is

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14 billion light years away.

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I get that, but what about the guys who are on the edge of what we can see? How can they

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see beyond the other side?

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Oh, because...here's an interesting point. They don't know whether or not the entire

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universe is infinite. The universe could be twice our horizon or infinitely larger than

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our horizon. Same with the ocean. You don't know how much bigger the ocean is than your

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horizon is. You can keep sort of wandering around. Maybe you'll hit land as we've done,

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of course.

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So, now you go there. If the universe is really, really big, that will be the center of their

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own horizon. And whatever is the age of the universe is, for them at that time, that will

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be the radius to their horizon.

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Yeah, okay. I just want to make a remark. You drew the analogy of the sense of smell,

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and what a poor sense of smell we have. It's a fascinating fact that, although dogs, for

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example have a much better sense of smell than we have, as you mentioned...

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That's why I say sense of smell. That's what I should say, not that dogs smell better,

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but they have a better sense of smell. Thank you for that.

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But we have the genes that would have once enabled our ancestors to have as good a sense

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of smell as dogs, but the genes have mostly been turned off; so we have vestiges. We have

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historical relics of those genes.

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It's like your hard disk on your computer that's cluttered up with remains of old chapters

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you've written here and there and things that have now been cut off. Those genes have been

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turned off, but they're still there.

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Isn't that the premise of X-Men?

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I don't know.

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They're human, but they have a genetically different...different genes are turned on

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and off within them, giving them special powers. So, are you suggesting the day might arise,

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we go inside the human genome and flick the dipswitches on and off, and we come out as

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superheroes?

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Put it this way. It's not as unlikely as it might have appeared before we realized that

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we do have those genes still. You don't have to import the genes from dogs, although the

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technology of this coming century may enable that to happen.

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I'd still rather it be the dog that sniffs the bomb than me.

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But we would probably have robots to do the sniffing. What about this point about the

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difficulty of...maybe I chose too easy an example. The brain, how is it that the human

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brain, which evolved to do really rather mundane things...

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...to not get eaten by lions.

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To not get eaten by lions in the Pleistocene of Africa because, as you'll learn this evening,

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we are all Africans. We all come from Africa, and our brains were shaped by natural selection

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on the African plains to do things that involve objects like this. Medium-sized objects.

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Macro-sized objects.

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Macro-sized objects that don't move anywhere near the speed of light. It's a tremendous

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tribute to our species that we are capable...at least some of us are capable...of understanding

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things that don't belong on that ordinary macroscopic, slow-moving scale.

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Yeah, and so therein is the value to us, not only of the methods and tools of science,

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but also of the language of the universe that we call mathematics. Remarkable thing, a point

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first advanced by Eugene Wigner that math has an unreasonable utility in the universe

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since we just invented it out of our heads. You don't discover math under a rock, as you

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might find grubs. You invent it out of whole cloth, yet is empowers us to provide accurate

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the predictive descriptions and understandings of the universe.

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So, what comes of this is you learn to abandon your senses. That's a like from the Broadway

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musical Phantom of the Opera...abandon your...never mind, sorry. I want to write Broadway lyrics

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one day in another life.

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You train yourself to abandon your senses because you recognize how they can fool you

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into thinking one thing is true that is not. You abandon them. You use your tools that

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do the measuring to say, okay, that's the reality. Then you make a mathematical model

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of that that you can manipulate logically...because math is all about the logical extension of

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one point to another...and then you can make new discoveries about the world that, frankly,

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you'll just have to get used to you.

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No longer do you have the right...right is not the right work, but no longer are you

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justified saying that idea in science is not true because it doesn't make sense. Nobody

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cares about your senses. Your senses came out...forget the Serengeti, just growing up.

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As a kid, something's in your hand, you let go of it, it falls. You tip a glass, water

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spills. You are assembling a rule book for how nature works in the macroscopic world.

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The microscope takes you smaller than that; the telescope takes you bigger; and the other

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laws of physics manifest themselves in those regimes that you have no life experience reckoning.

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It's math that allows you to take these incremental steps beyond the capacity of your senses and

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perhaps even the capacity of your mind. Yes, it's the mind that's taking the steps, but

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your mind was not deducing that by just looking at the world with your senses. It was helped

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out. It was aided by these tools that, yes, we invented.

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And at some point when you get so used to doing the mathematics, it becomes kind of

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intuitive in rather the way that I'm told that pilots get used to flying a plane, and

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they start to feel the wings of the plane as being almost part of their own bodies.

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They develop...

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Before or after the drinks before they took off? Is this a common sensory perception of

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pilots.

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Yeah, I think it is. It's a common thing that I think that, when people get skilled at using

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micromanipulators where they're using their hands, and what actually going on is tiny

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little miniscule movement going on under a microscope...

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...so it becomes their hands.

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It becomes their hands.

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The plane becomes the pilot, or the pilot becomes...

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Just as you said, the telescope is an extension of the eyes.

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My advisor in graduate school...one of my advisors, I spoke to him one morning. He was

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doing research on star clusters that have these huge orbits around the center of the

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galaxy. He said he had a dream the night before where he was one of these clusters, and he

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was orbiting the center of the galaxy. I thought that was so cool.

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Yes, yes.

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If you start becoming in your cosmic dream...I want to have those dreams because then, you

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think creatively about what remains to be discovered.

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Absolutely. I sometimes wonder about whether surgeons, maybe even surgeons of the present

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who are using micromanipulators inside a body, something like when they stick that thing

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up you, and it goes...

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They stick a lot of things up you, the last I've heard.

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Okay, and already you have surgeons driving an endoscope inside and turning left to get

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round the intestine, turning right. I imagine the time will come when a surgeon will have

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virtual reality goggles on, and the surgeon will actually feel herself to be inside the

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body of the patient and will turn left and literally walk across the room, and that will

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be translated into the micromanipulators, the endoscope, moving.

220
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This sounds really cool. I like this idea. And you know what you'd have to do? You would

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have to alter the dominant laws of physics in that regime because, if you're small enough

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a la Fantastic Voyage, the 1960's film, when you're that small, capillary action and surface

223
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tension and all manners of other forces take over and that then becomes your new reality,

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your new sensory standards.

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That's right. You would have to become sensitive to surface tension. D'Arcy Thompson made the

226
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point, I think in 1919, that to the world of an insect, gravity is negligible.

227
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A completely...it's who cares?

228
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What matters is surface tension, and you'd have to be...I never thought of that, but

229
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what I'd do...

230
00:20:34,660 --> 00:20:36,950
That's because you didn't see the move Bug's Life, okay?

231
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Okay.

232
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In Bug's Life, they serve up a cocktail to an insect that goes up to a bar, and all the

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bartender does is pour out water from a spigot and hand him the ball of water, like that,

234
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and the surface...this was brilliant of the cartoonist, of the illustrator, and then,

235
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he sticks a straw into the sphere and sucks it out. No receptacle needed. You got to get

236
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out more.

237
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Well, I imagine my surgeon of the future being armed with a virtual saw, one of those...what

238
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are those things you cut trees down with...band saws, and what's really going on is a tiny

239
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little micro scalpel inside, but the surgeon is wielding an axe, and it's all done by virtual

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entity.

241
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I've got a question back to you. I lose sleep over this, and I've always wanted to be in

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the company of a leading biologist to get insight into this. As an astrophysicist, we've

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seen throughout time the hubris that comes with any discovery that gets made, or the

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hubris that prevents the acceptance of a discovery that might demote your sense of self from

245
00:22:01,000 --> 00:22:03,610
whatever you previously imagined it to be.

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Among them is where is earth? Is it the center of all things? No. It's not even a significant

247
00:22:09,320 --> 00:22:15,440
planet in orbit around an ordinary star in the corner of an ordinary galaxy, one of a

248
00:22:15,440 --> 00:22:22,740
hundred billion galaxies in the universe. And so, here we are saying let's search life

249
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in the universe, intelligent life like us. Well, who are we to say that we're intelligent?

250
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I pose that not as a joke questions, but as a very serious question. We define ourselves

251
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to be intelligent in ways that no other creature can rival. Okay, now, what do we credit that

252
00:22:46,140 --> 00:22:51,330
intelligence to? So, you look at the genome, and let's take the chimp. I guess that's a

253
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really close relative of ours, and we have...what is it? High 90's percent identical, indistinguishable

254
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DNA, and the chimp does not build the Hubble telescope, and the chimp does not compose

255
00:23:03,220 --> 00:23:09,570
symphonies. So, we must then declare that everything we say about us that is intelligent

256
00:23:09,570 --> 00:23:14,350
is found in that one-and-a-half percent difference in DNA. First, is that a fair statement to

257
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make?

258
00:23:15,060 --> 00:23:15,770
Yes.

259
00:23:15,770 --> 00:23:22,510
Okay. Let me invert that question. If the genetic difference between humans and chimps

260
00:23:22,510 --> 00:23:29,270
is that small, maybe the difference in our intelligence is also that small. Maybe the

261
00:23:29,270 --> 00:23:35,500
difference between stacking boxes and reaching a banana, putting up an umbrella when it rains,

262
00:23:35,500 --> 00:23:40,060
whatever are these rudimentary things a chimp does that the primatologists roll them forward

263
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and boast about, which of course, our toddlers can do, maybe the difference between that

264
00:23:45,720 --> 00:23:49,840
and the Hubble telescope is as small as that difference in DNA.

265
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I pose the question: suppose there was another life form on earth or elsewhere that, in that

266
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same sort of vector, that one-and-a-half percent difference we are to chimps, suppose they

267
00:24:00,660 --> 00:24:06,730
were one-and-a-half percent different from us? Then would then roll the smartest of us

268
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in front of their hematologists and say, Hawking, there's Hawking. Oh, this one is slightly

269
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smarter than the rest of them because he can do astrophysics calculations in his head.

270
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Like little Timmy over here.

271
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So, I wonder if we're just blithering idiots in the presence of even a trivially smarter

272
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species than us. Therefore, who are we to even assert that, number one, we are intelligent,

273
00:24:40,520 --> 00:24:45,550
and we're looking for others at least as intelligent as us out there to talk to.

274
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By the way, is there any other species on earth that we can talk to? Can we have a conversation

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with a chimp? That has identical DNA, and I don't think we can actually say, hey, what

276
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movie do you want to see tonight? You don't have that conversation with a chimp. Yet somehow,

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we believe, we want to believe that an alien on another planet that's not even based on

278
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DNA and, even if it is, it's not nothing like us, that we could communicate with it.

279
00:25:11,550 --> 00:25:21,050
I'm screaming at you. I'm sorry. So there! Are we as stupid as I'm saying?

280
00:25:21,050 --> 00:25:26,880
Well, I'm all for deflating hubris; but it's also true, of course, that our brains are

281
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anatomically very, very much bigger than chimps, and so that also must be contained in some

282
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sense in that tiny little percentage of DNA. I think the way to sort of look at the DNA

283
00:25:37,110 --> 00:25:43,710
problem is to say that the sort of DNA that has been sequenced, and the sort of thing

284
00:25:43,710 --> 00:25:54,000
on which we base that calculation of the 98 percent...again, look at a computer, and you

285
00:25:54,000 --> 00:26:00,420
will find that most of the programs that are written at the machine code level are calling

286
00:26:00,420 --> 00:26:01,980
out the same set of subroutines.

287
00:26:01,980 --> 00:26:06,690
There's a subroutine for pulling down menu bars and a subroutine for moving windows and

288
00:26:06,690 --> 00:26:13,750
so on. That's what we're looking at in this 98 percent. What we're not looking at is the

289
00:26:13,750 --> 00:26:18,350
set of sort of high-level instructions that say call this subroutine now, now call this

290
00:26:18,350 --> 00:26:22,140
one, now call this one, now call that one. It's not just humans and chimpanzees; all

291
00:26:22,140 --> 00:26:29,059
mammals have pretty much the same repertoire of genetic subroutines.

292
00:26:29,059 --> 00:26:32,870
The difference between a man and a mouse, like the difference the difference between

293
00:26:32,870 --> 00:26:37,900
a man and a chimpanzee is the order in which they're called, the sequence in which they're

294
00:26:37,900 --> 00:26:43,350
called during embryology which causes the really quite substantial anatomical differences

295
00:26:43,350 --> 00:26:48,860
between a human and a mouse and the quite big differences in brain size.

296
00:26:48,860 --> 00:26:55,490
If we assume we're not some measure of things, then as I said earlier, that tells me that

297
00:26:55,490 --> 00:27:02,000
the day might come where we could go in, understand which sequences are called in what way, and

298
00:27:02,000 --> 00:27:05,890
invent whole new sequences never before dreamt of by biology?

299
00:27:05,890 --> 00:27:07,090
Yep, absolutely.

300
00:27:07,090 --> 00:27:09,390
Empowering us in ways never before...

301
00:27:09,390 --> 00:27:13,880
It's very, very difficult. It's much more difficult than it sounds; but still, it's

302
00:27:13,880 --> 00:27:20,309
in principle possible. But the other point about intelligent life in the universe, never

303
00:27:20,309 --> 00:27:27,120
mind how we define intelligence. We're only going to encounter them if they are intelligent

304
00:27:27,120 --> 00:27:31,520
enough either to come here, which is very difficult indeed, or to send radio transmissions

305
00:27:31,520 --> 00:27:37,290
to us, which is a lot easier but still requires...let's just define it as the quality that you need

306
00:27:37,290 --> 00:27:40,780
in order send information across the universe.

307
00:27:40,780 --> 00:27:44,679
Now, you don't have to call that intelligence, but whatever it is, that's what it needs in

308
00:27:44,679 --> 00:27:48,820
order to get here, in order for us to apprehend it.

309
00:27:48,820 --> 00:27:53,720
And I wonder, you know, surely you've walked past a worm that had just crawled out of the

310
00:27:53,720 --> 00:27:59,110
earth; and when you did so, you weren't saying to yourself, gee, I wonder what that worm

311
00:27:59,110 --> 00:28:03,460
is thinking because you just simply didn't care. You're so far beyond the...I don't want

312
00:28:03,460 --> 00:28:07,600
to put words in your mouth, but I'm imagining you simply really don't care what the worm

313
00:28:07,600 --> 00:28:15,570
is thinking; and conversely, the worm has no clue that you consider yourself intelligent.

314
00:28:15,570 --> 00:28:17,309
You're just this thing that went by.

315
00:28:17,309 --> 00:28:23,559
So, can you imagine a species that has such high intelligence that the prospect of communicating

316
00:28:23,559 --> 00:28:25,890
with us is simply of no interest to them?

317
00:28:25,890 --> 00:28:26,980
Yeah, I can. Yeah.

318
00:28:26,980 --> 00:28:31,750
And they go by, and their intelligence is on such a level that we can't even recognize

319
00:28:31,750 --> 00:28:32,960
it as intelligence.

320
00:28:32,960 --> 00:28:37,980
Yes. Moreover, I think it would more or less have to be that much ahead of us if we were

321
00:28:37,980 --> 00:28:40,400
ever to meet them because we're never going to get there.

322
00:28:40,400 --> 00:28:47,360
Yeah, we sure as hell ain't getting there. See the massive budget lately? If not...

323
00:28:47,360 --> 00:28:52,400
So, anything that gets here has got to have a very, very highly-developed technology,

324
00:28:52,400 --> 00:28:54,450
far more than we've...

325
00:28:54,450 --> 00:28:58,760
That brings us to Stephen Hawking's concern about any civilization sufficiently advanced

326
00:28:58,760 --> 00:29:04,650
to visit us, what does that say about the consequence of that encounter? And he's worried,

327
00:29:04,650 --> 00:29:09,260
of course, because he's taking his cue from the history of humans. When one has a more

328
00:29:09,260 --> 00:29:15,340
advanced technology than the other, and they visit, it almost is always bad for those with

329
00:29:15,340 --> 00:29:21,790
the lesser technology. South America, one of the more obvious examples, in their first

330
00:29:21,790 --> 00:29:28,250
encounter with the Spaniards...so, I don't know if I want to be the first one to shake

331
00:29:28,250 --> 00:29:37,130
hands...shake whatever appendage...whatever they're sticking forward, I don't know...

332
00:29:37,130 --> 00:29:43,000
I want to do it, but I still have my concerns.

333
00:29:43,000 --> 00:29:46,760
What do you think are the odds that there is life elsewhere in the universe?

334
00:29:46,760 --> 00:29:52,980
They must be high, and I'll tell you why. People say, well, have you found life yet?

335
00:29:52,980 --> 00:29:58,860
No. Well. That's like going to the ocean...this has been said before...taking a cup of water,

336
00:29:58,860 --> 00:30:05,730
scooping it up, and saying there are no whales in the ocean. You know? Here's my data. You

337
00:30:05,730 --> 00:30:13,640
know? You need a slightly bigger sample.

338
00:30:13,640 --> 00:30:18,050
If you look at, for example, what we call the radio bubble. This is the sphere around

339
00:30:18,050 --> 00:30:23,929
earth, centered on earth, which is the farthest our radio signals have reached in the galaxy.

340
00:30:23,929 --> 00:30:29,220
They're about 70 light years away. We've been transmitting radio signals, inadvertently

341
00:30:29,220 --> 00:30:34,780
leaking into space, for about 70 years. Seventy light year radius sphere.

342
00:30:34,780 --> 00:30:40,630
Well, how big is the galaxy? Well, shrink that sphere down to maybe the size of a BB,

343
00:30:40,630 --> 00:30:45,870
and then, the galaxy, on that scale, would be the size of this stage. That's how far

344
00:30:45,870 --> 00:30:49,790
our radio signals have traveled, and those aren't even the ones we sent on purpose. The

345
00:30:49,790 --> 00:30:57,790
ones we sent on purpose have traveled much less. So no, we haven't actually reached as

346
00:30:57,790 --> 00:31:02,440
far into the galaxy as we'd like before we would say definitively that there's no one

347
00:31:02,440 --> 00:31:04,700
intelligent living today.

348
00:31:04,700 --> 00:31:12,500
But here's some very simple facts. I can review them in 90 seconds. You look at the formation

349
00:31:12,500 --> 00:31:17,770
of the earth and the earliest sign of fossil life. Subtract a few hundred million years

350
00:31:17,770 --> 00:31:22,690
at the beginning of earth when earth was a shooting gallery, earth was still excreting

351
00:31:22,690 --> 00:31:29,140
the birth materials of the solar system. It's hostile to complex chemistry over that time;

352
00:31:29,140 --> 00:31:33,980
not fair to start the clock then. Wait a couple of hundred million years. Now start the clock,

353
00:31:33,980 --> 00:31:39,049
and wait around and see when you have the first signs of single-celled life.

354
00:31:39,049 --> 00:31:47,240
At most, 400 million years. At most. Earth has been around for four-and-a-half billion.

355
00:31:47,240 --> 00:31:55,049
So earth, without any help from us, with basic ingredients found throughout the universe,

356
00:31:55,049 --> 00:32:05,580
managed to create life, simple though it was. And earth, one of eight planets...get over

357
00:32:05,580 --> 00:32:16,500
it...sorry. Earth around an ordinary star?

358
00:32:16,500 --> 00:32:21,340
To suggest...and what are the ingredients of life? The number one atom in your body

359
00:32:21,340 --> 00:32:27,410
is hydrogen. Number two atom is oxygen, together making mostly water that's in you. Next is

360
00:32:27,410 --> 00:32:34,640
carbon in this order. Next is nitrogen. Next is other stuff. My favorite element, other.

361
00:32:34,640 --> 00:32:35,290
Yeah?

362
00:32:35,290 --> 00:32:39,900
You look at the universe, the number one element in the universe is hydrogen. Next is helium,

363
00:32:39,900 --> 00:32:44,720
chemically inert, couldn't do anything with it anyway. Next is carbon. I think I left

364
00:32:44,720 --> 00:32:50,799
out oxygen there. Next is oxygen. Next is nitrogen. One for one. We're not even made

365
00:32:50,799 --> 00:32:57,390
of odd things. The most common things in the universe are found here on earth, and we're

366
00:32:57,390 --> 00:33:00,480
made of them.

367
00:33:00,480 --> 00:33:05,830
And carbon? The most chemically fertile element on the periodic table? It's not a surprise

368
00:33:05,830 --> 00:33:14,179
we're carbon-based. Life is just the extreme expression of complex chemistry. That's what

369
00:33:14,179 --> 00:33:21,870
biology is. All these people who want to imagine, because they remembered the chemistry class

370
00:33:21,870 --> 00:33:29,040
that silicon sits right below carbon on the periodic table, so it bonds similarly to carbon,

371
00:33:29,040 --> 00:33:31,400
so they want to imagine silicon-based life.

372
00:33:31,400 --> 00:33:36,790
I'm saying, okay, fine; but you don't have to. There is five times as much carbon in

373
00:33:36,790 --> 00:33:43,190
the universe as silicon. There's no need to even have to go there. We've got enough to

374
00:33:43,190 --> 00:33:49,650
imagine just simply with the carbon atom at the center of these huge biological molecules.

375
00:33:49,650 --> 00:33:53,880
Point is, it happened relatively quickly with the most common ingredients in the universe.

376
00:33:53,880 --> 00:33:59,440
To now say life on earth is unique in the universe would be inexcusably egocentric.

377
00:33:59,440 --> 00:34:08,440
Yeah, I agree with that; and I would go further and say that, if ever you meet somebody who

378
00:34:08,440 --> 00:34:13,950
wishes to claim that he believes or she believes that life is unique in the universe, then

379
00:34:13,950 --> 00:34:18,510
it would follow from that belief that the origin of life on this planet would have to

380
00:34:18,510 --> 00:34:24,820
be a quite stupefyingly rare and improbable event, and that would have the rather odd

381
00:34:24,820 --> 00:34:32,679
consequence that, when chemists try to work out theories, models of the origin of life,

382
00:34:32,679 --> 00:34:38,550
what they should be looking for is a stupendously improbable theory, an implausible theory.

383
00:34:38,550 --> 00:34:41,220
If there was a plausible theory of the origin of life...

384
00:34:41,220 --> 00:34:42,820
...it wouldn't be it.

385
00:34:42,820 --> 00:34:50,770
That's right because then life would have to be everywhere. Now maybe it is everywhere.

386
00:34:50,770 --> 00:34:56,060
My hunch is that there's lots and lots of life in the universe; but because the universe

387
00:34:56,060 --> 00:35:01,869
is so vast, the islands of life that there are are so spaced that it's unlikely that

388
00:35:01,869 --> 00:35:05,100
anyone of them will meet any other, which is rather sad.

389
00:35:05,100 --> 00:35:10,670
It's sad. However, let me make you happy a little bit more from that. We've learned now

390
00:35:10,670 --> 00:35:15,410
that we can model the formation of the solar system, and this period of time where earth

391
00:35:15,410 --> 00:35:21,869
was being bombarded heavily...that's called the period of heavy bombardment in the early

392
00:35:21,869 --> 00:35:32,680
universe. We call it like we see it in astrophysics, let the record show.

393
00:35:32,680 --> 00:35:37,740
I don't know if I've ever in my life ever understood the title of a biology research

394
00:35:37,740 --> 00:35:47,560
paper. I just want to say that. The words just...I'm not feeling them, you know? They're

395
00:35:47,560 --> 00:35:52,859
too big, too many syllables. I'm off topic here, so...

396
00:35:52,859 --> 00:35:59,300
The period of heavy bombardment and, with computer simulations you can model what happens

397
00:35:59,300 --> 00:36:04,770
when an impact hits a planetary surface. It's not much different from if you sprinkle cheerios

398
00:36:04,770 --> 00:36:11,230
on a bed, which you would never do on purpose, but your kids would do this; and then, you

399
00:36:11,230 --> 00:36:16,720
smack the surface of the bed, there's a sort of recoiling effect, and cheerios pop upwards.

400
00:36:16,720 --> 00:36:22,859
It turns out Mars may have been wet...we know at some point, it had water...and fertile

401
00:36:22,859 --> 00:36:30,330
for life before earth. At this period of heavy bombardment, if it had started life, surely

402
00:36:30,330 --> 00:36:35,030
it would have been simple life. There's no reason to think otherwise. We've learned that

403
00:36:35,030 --> 00:36:37,900
bacteria can be quite hardy, as you surely know.

404
00:36:37,900 --> 00:36:43,390
So, we imagine a bacterial stowaway in the nooks and crannies of one of these rocks that

405
00:36:43,390 --> 00:36:49,880
are cast back into space. In fact, if you do the calculation, there's hundreds of tons

406
00:36:49,880 --> 00:36:56,630
of Mars rocks that should have fallen to earth by now over the history of the solar system.

407
00:36:56,630 --> 00:37:03,100
Maybe one of those rocks carried life from Mars to earth, seeding life on earth.

408
00:37:03,100 --> 00:37:09,480
My great disappointment would be going to Mars and finding Mars life based on DNA. Then

409
00:37:09,480 --> 00:37:13,790
it would not have been a separate experiment in life. We would just all simply have to

410
00:37:13,790 --> 00:37:18,320
get over the fact that we are Martian descendants.

411
00:37:18,320 --> 00:37:22,920
What we need is a second sample of life. We have only one at present.

412
00:37:22,920 --> 00:37:24,780
Why have you only given us one?

413
00:37:24,780 --> 00:37:30,310
It would be a disappointment, as you say, if we found life on Mars based on DNA; but

414
00:37:30,310 --> 00:37:35,830
at least, if we found life on Mars based on the same DNA code, just about imagine DNA

415
00:37:35,830 --> 00:37:45,820
evolving twice, but you couldn't imagine the same four-letter code evolving twice.

416
00:37:45,820 --> 00:37:52,240
But I wanted to make a point that your calculation that it took only about 400 million years

417
00:37:52,240 --> 00:37:58,900
at the most for the first life to arise. For the first life capable of broadcasting radio

418
00:37:58,900 --> 00:38:03,780
waves capable of being detected elsewhere in the universe, it took approximately just

419
00:38:03,780 --> 00:38:12,970
under four billion years. Well no, about four billion years, which is about half the life

420
00:38:12,970 --> 00:38:16,510
that we can expect the solar system to exist.

421
00:38:16,510 --> 00:38:24,210
Sure. An important point, by the way, because we were human before we had the technology

422
00:38:24,210 --> 00:38:30,940
to broadcast. So if your criterion for whether a planet has intelligent life, and if we are

423
00:38:30,940 --> 00:38:35,250
the measure of intelligence, then there could be plenty of planets out there with Roman

424
00:38:35,250 --> 00:38:40,270
Empires and whatever else and them not sending radio signals; but any close enough observer

425
00:38:40,270 --> 00:38:42,750
would surely declare them to be intelligent.

426
00:38:42,750 --> 00:38:47,750
The time interval between Roman Empires and radio signals is negligible compared to the

427
00:38:47,750 --> 00:38:53,980
total time we're talking about. It's an interesting question, how long it takes once you get language,

428
00:38:53,980 --> 00:38:58,960
once you get civilization, once you get culture, how long does it take to get radio waves?

429
00:38:58,960 --> 00:39:04,460
Indeed, how long does it take to get self-destructive weapons that blow the whole lot up? That's

430
00:39:04,460 --> 00:39:05,030
the next...

431
00:39:05,030 --> 00:39:10,310
And you're even...there's an implicit assumption, that you're making inadvertently possibly,

432
00:39:10,310 --> 00:39:17,119
that intelligence is an inevitable consequence of the evolutionary record, and I'm skeptical

433
00:39:17,119 --> 00:39:21,290
of that because, if that were the case, what we call our intelligence would have happened

434
00:39:21,290 --> 00:39:26,250
multiple times in the fossil record, and it hasn't, whereas other things have shown up

435
00:39:26,250 --> 00:39:30,580
plenty of times, like the sense of sight and locomotion.

436
00:39:30,580 --> 00:39:35,880
There's some rather inventive ways things can get around the world. My favorite is the

437
00:39:35,880 --> 00:39:41,980
snake, of course; no arms, no legs, yet it gets around just fine. I'm imagining an alien

438
00:39:41,980 --> 00:39:47,720
visiting earth, stumbling on a snake, the only creature it sees, right? And then, it

439
00:39:47,720 --> 00:39:50,810
goes back and tells its home people, you're not going to believe what I saw. There's a

440
00:39:50,810 --> 00:39:56,790
creature on that planet, no arms, no legs; it can still get around. It detects its prey

441
00:39:56,790 --> 00:40:01,730
with infrared rays and can eat things five times bigger than its head; and they'll think

442
00:40:01,730 --> 00:40:06,800
the guy was on drugs. It's an ordinary snake, sitting here on our earth.

443
00:40:06,800 --> 00:40:13,150
While I'm on the subject, a big disappointment I have are Hollywood aliens, and I don't know

444
00:40:13,150 --> 00:40:17,570
who to blame for this, Hollywood or biologists that advised them. Hollywood aliens are way

445
00:40:17,570 --> 00:40:24,590
too anthropomorphic for me. Even ET, he had a head, shoulders, arms. Okay, he had three

446
00:40:24,590 --> 00:40:29,150
fingers instead of five; they're still fingers at the end of a hand. He had legs; he had

447
00:40:29,150 --> 00:40:33,730
feet. That's human. And look at the diversity of life on earth to draw from? If you want

448
00:40:33,730 --> 00:40:42,300
to think about the ways of being alive? I'm just so disappointed.

449
00:40:42,300 --> 00:40:46,320
Not even that I know I can help them, but one of my favorite aliens ever was the Blob.

450
00:40:46,320 --> 00:40:48,540
Did you see that movie?

451
00:40:48,540 --> 00:40:50,020
No, I don't see as many movies as you.

452
00:40:50,020 --> 00:41:00,109
Blob is classic. So, that alien was a blob. That's what it was. And it would just kind

453
00:41:00,109 --> 00:41:04,780
of move along, and it would grab onto you and suck out your blood, and keep moving.

454
00:41:04,780 --> 00:41:11,300
It was non-anthropic in concept, and it came from space. I just thought that was an attempt

455
00:41:11,300 --> 00:41:14,630
to try to create some kind of way of being alive.

456
00:41:14,630 --> 00:41:18,230
That's a very laudable attempt. It is very interesting to look around the animal kingdom

457
00:41:18,230 --> 00:41:22,990
and count up the number of times that some things have evolved. I mean, eyes several

458
00:41:22,990 --> 00:41:28,580
dozen times; ears quite a large number of times. Echo location, that's finding a way

459
00:41:28,580 --> 00:41:31,520
around by sonar, only four times.

460
00:41:31,520 --> 00:41:33,800
A bat and who else?

461
00:41:33,800 --> 00:41:40,630
A bat, whales, and two different groups of birds, cave-dwelling birds. And a few rudimentary

462
00:41:40,630 --> 00:41:46,349
examples in some shrews and sea lions, but really four different times. Intelligence

463
00:41:46,349 --> 00:41:50,550
and language of a human kind, only once, as you pointed out.

464
00:41:50,550 --> 00:41:56,349
So, it can't be that important for survival. If natural selection is at work, it should

465
00:41:56,349 --> 00:41:57,740
have shown up many more times.

466
00:41:57,740 --> 00:42:02,660
You'd think so. It's a genuinely interesting point that I think biologists haven't thought

467
00:42:02,660 --> 00:42:09,160
about enough is to go around the animal kingdom, counting up the number of separate arisings

468
00:42:09,160 --> 00:42:13,540
of something because that does tell you something about what you might expect elsewhere in the

469
00:42:13,540 --> 00:42:21,040
universe. You'd expect eyes. You might expect echo location. Hypodermic syringes, stingers.

470
00:42:21,040 --> 00:42:26,859
About a couple of dozen...I'm talking about independent evolutions now. You talk about

471
00:42:26,859 --> 00:42:27,780
spiders...

472
00:42:27,780 --> 00:42:30,590
Our version of that would be called guns. Yeah.

473
00:42:30,590 --> 00:42:31,530
What?

474
00:42:31,530 --> 00:42:35,020
Our version of the hypodermic stinger would be called a gun, allowing you to sting someone

475
00:42:35,020 --> 00:42:35,349
with...

476
00:42:35,349 --> 00:42:42,750
Yes, okay. But I'm talking about it as something that penetrates the body and injects poison.

477
00:42:42,750 --> 00:42:44,530
That's an interesting question.

478
00:42:44,530 --> 00:42:51,060
Another relevant point is look around the world at different island continents and say

479
00:42:51,060 --> 00:42:57,810
how similar are they? Look at Australia. The Australian mammals, for example; and there

480
00:42:57,810 --> 00:43:02,250
are very, very power similarities between Australian mammals, which evolved entirely

481
00:43:02,250 --> 00:43:08,300
independently of mammals in South America, independently again of mammals in Asia and

482
00:43:08,300 --> 00:43:08,630
Africa.

483
00:43:08,630 --> 00:43:15,480
Again, that gives you a kind of a clue for how predictable evolution is. Other worlds

484
00:43:15,480 --> 00:43:19,869
are going to be very different, but we perhaps shouldn't write off the possibility that the

485
00:43:19,869 --> 00:43:28,200
Hollywood aliens might not be that unimaginative. I mean, my colleague Simon Conway Morris has

486
00:43:28,200 --> 00:43:34,109
even suggested that it's very likely that there will be, if not humans, at least bipedal,

487
00:43:34,109 --> 00:43:41,150
big-brained, language-toting, hand-toting, forward-looking eyes for stereoscopy, pretty

488
00:43:41,150 --> 00:43:45,190
much humans. He thinks it's highly likely. He's got a religious agenda, I'm sorry to

489
00:43:45,190 --> 00:43:52,190
say, for that; but like him, I appreciate the power of natural selection.

490
00:43:52,190 --> 00:44:04,780
By the way, I think if he were a creature other than a primate, he might be giving a

491
00:44:04,780 --> 00:44:06,320
different list of things that matter.

492
00:44:06,320 --> 00:44:07,830
I think that's probably right.

493
00:44:07,830 --> 00:44:11,500
The horse doesn't have two eyes facing forward, but the horse damn near can see directly behind

494
00:44:11,500 --> 00:44:15,310
it; and so, the horse would be valuing that fact.

495
00:44:15,310 --> 00:44:18,490
Oh, I'm not denigrating horses at all.

496
00:44:18,490 --> 00:44:25,880
I'm just saying your first sign that there's bias is you start listing the human features

497
00:44:25,880 --> 00:44:26,810
that you would want in an alien.

498
00:44:26,810 --> 00:44:31,220
No, no, no. I don't want to say that I'm not picking on humans because they're superior

499
00:44:31,220 --> 00:44:36,530
but because they're us. I mean, we have stereoscopic vision. We have three-dimensional vision.

500
00:44:36,530 --> 00:44:40,550
Horses don't. They have a different kind of vision. Insects have a different kind of vision.

501
00:44:40,550 --> 00:44:48,330
Bats have echo...I mean, it's not vision, but it's using sound to produce what I would

502
00:44:48,330 --> 00:44:55,300
guess inside the bat's brain is probably perceived rather the same way we perceive visually because

503
00:44:55,300 --> 00:44:59,790
why wouldn't you use the tools of the brain, the mammalian brain to create an image, to

504
00:44:59,790 --> 00:45:04,369
create a model of the world.

505
00:45:04,369 --> 00:45:07,140
They show that in the, forgive me, movie Daredevil.

506
00:45:07,140 --> 00:45:10,580
Do they have bats...?

507
00:45:10,580 --> 00:45:18,250
He's blind, and he likes when it rains because the rain hits people, and he hears the different

508
00:45:18,250 --> 00:45:23,760
sort of reflections of the sound, and he saw his girlfriend for the first time in the rain.

509
00:45:23,760 --> 00:45:24,590
There's the image of her...

510
00:45:24,590 --> 00:45:26,740
Okay, but my speculation is that bats hear...

511
00:45:26,740 --> 00:45:29,910
This is America. I've got to talk about our movies here, you know.

512
00:45:29,910 --> 00:45:34,950
My speculation is that bats hear in color because why wouldn't you use color? Color

513
00:45:34,950 --> 00:45:41,190
is just a hue, a perceived hue. It's nothing more than a label the brain uses.

514
00:45:41,190 --> 00:45:46,080
Precisely. That's all it is. Color, you attach it to some sequence of changed phenomenon.

515
00:45:46,080 --> 00:45:53,900
So, bats would usefully use color as a sign. For example, if you're between a furry moth

516
00:45:53,900 --> 00:45:59,500
and a leathery locust, it might be perceived as red versus blue, and that would be a very

517
00:45:59,500 --> 00:46:05,740
useful way for natural selection to have tied the labels of hue onto something that would

518
00:46:05,740 --> 00:46:08,720
seem very strange to us.

519
00:46:08,720 --> 00:46:11,670
We're coming to the end of our time.

520
00:46:11,670 --> 00:46:13,869
Did we just begin, like a second ago?

521
00:46:13,869 --> 00:46:18,130
Well, that's rather what I felt. If we want to have some time questions...

522
00:46:18,130 --> 00:46:23,130
...which I would very much like that, but I had a couple more bones to pick with you.

523
00:46:23,130 --> 00:46:26,200
Okay, well, let's go quickly through those bones.

524
00:46:26,200 --> 00:46:30,170
Okay. And if you start formulating questions in your head...

525
00:46:30,170 --> 00:46:42,890
Some years ago, 1994 was it? Or 1996, there was this rock in Antarctica, a meteorite discovered

526
00:46:42,890 --> 00:46:50,849
ALH84001, which had tantalizing evidence...by the way, that rock was from Mars, one of the

527
00:46:50,849 --> 00:46:55,760
tonnage of rocks that we know are out there, and there was evidence in one of the nooks

528
00:46:55,760 --> 00:47:06,680
of that rock for possible life, traceable not to earth but from Mars.

529
00:47:06,680 --> 00:47:13,680
The evidence was very circumstantial but interesting, nonetheless. There was chemistry there that

530
00:47:13,680 --> 00:47:18,880
could only happen in the presence of oxygen, and there was chemistry there occupying a

531
00:47:18,880 --> 00:47:24,609
similar spot that could happen only in the absence of oxygen. Well, you might say who

532
00:47:24,609 --> 00:47:30,810
cares? Well, life is just such a machine. When you breathe in oxygen, you oxygenate

533
00:47:30,810 --> 00:47:35,020
the hemoglobin, that oxygen gets used for your metabolism, and it goes back without

534
00:47:35,020 --> 00:47:41,310
the oxygen. In the same body, you have oxygenating and deoxygenating forces operating within

535
00:47:41,310 --> 00:47:44,339
you. So, life does it for free.

536
00:47:44,339 --> 00:47:47,599
If you don't appeal to life, you have to have the rock hang out over here for a while and

537
00:47:47,599 --> 00:47:53,330
then roll down a cliff and go anaerobic for a while. You have to sort of patch it together.

538
00:47:53,330 --> 00:47:59,920
So, it was all the news, page one story. They even had an electron microscope photo of what

539
00:47:59,920 --> 00:48:04,780
looked like an itty, bitty worm. It had little segments on it. It was intriguing. That was

540
00:48:04,780 --> 00:48:10,390
not the lead evidence of the authors, it was just kind of interesting. It was about one-tenth

541
00:48:10,390 --> 00:48:14,920
the size of the smallest worms on earth but interesting, nonetheless.

542
00:48:14,920 --> 00:48:20,310
I'm invited to comment on this. In fact, it was Charlie Rose. He had four people. I'm

543
00:48:20,310 --> 00:48:27,430
the astrophysicist. They had a biologist. They had a philosopher. And a picture of the

544
00:48:27,430 --> 00:48:32,730
worm comes up. The biologist, who is piped in by screen said, “That can't possibly

545
00:48:32,730 --> 00:48:41,510
be life.” So, I said, wow, what have I missed? “So, tell me, sir, why is that?” “Oh,

546
00:48:41,510 --> 00:48:46,670
because the smallest life on earth is 10 times that size,” and I'm still waiting for him

547
00:48:46,670 --> 00:48:48,700
to give me the reason why it can't be life.

548
00:48:48,700 --> 00:48:53,089
Then I pause and reflected at that book. That is the reason he's giving me that it can't

549
00:48:53,089 --> 00:48:57,970
be life...his comparison with life on earth. And then I said, “Last I checked, we're

550
00:48:57,970 --> 00:49:04,990
talking about a rock from Mars. Why are you using earth to constrain your capacity to

551
00:49:04,990 --> 00:49:07,530
think about what exists out there?”

552
00:49:07,530 --> 00:49:16,119
My question to you: are biologists closed-minded or open-minded about what is possible in terms

553
00:49:16,119 --> 00:49:21,920
of biology in this universe? Because at the end of the day, you go behind closed doors,

554
00:49:21,920 --> 00:49:26,390
and you confess to yourselves that you only have a data sample of one because all life

555
00:49:26,390 --> 00:49:27,510
on earth has common DNA.

556
00:49:27,510 --> 00:49:29,180
Yeah. Well, he was being closed-minded.

557
00:49:29,180 --> 00:49:33,160
Most any other sciences, we would say that's not...how do you make science out of a sample

558
00:49:33,160 --> 00:49:33,730
of one?

559
00:49:33,730 --> 00:49:37,390
No, that's right. He was being closed-minded, no question about it because he was using

560
00:49:37,390 --> 00:49:42,369
his experience of life on this planet to make that generalization. On the other hand, one

561
00:49:42,369 --> 00:49:48,200
could make sure a statement by using the laws of physics, and you could say that there are

562
00:49:48,200 --> 00:49:52,230
certain things that wouldn't work for physical reasons.

563
00:49:52,230 --> 00:49:56,440
I'm not saying that a tiny worm wouldn't work for physical reasons, but I could imagine

564
00:49:56,440 --> 00:50:03,250
somebody making an argument that said you cannot have...for example, maybe there's a

565
00:50:03,250 --> 00:50:08,780
certain minimum size of eye that could form an image, for purely physical reasons. That

566
00:50:08,780 --> 00:50:10,349
would be a good reason why.

567
00:50:10,349 --> 00:50:14,650
And I'm there, all the way. It's just that he cited earth as his measure of what is possible.

568
00:50:14,650 --> 00:50:16,960
Well, he was just wrong.

569
00:50:16,960 --> 00:50:23,619
Okay. You don't align yourself with his closed-mindedness. That was the biggest thing I had to get off

570
00:50:23,619 --> 00:50:25,010
my chest here.

571
00:50:25,010 --> 00:50:29,240
Okay. Shall we bring up the lights, and see if there are...

572
00:50:29,240 --> 00:50:33,280
Are there microphones...? In the aisle apparently, so if you'll just line up in the two center

573
00:50:33,280 --> 00:50:38,210
aisles behind those microphones. I guess we can pick left and right for what questions

574
00:50:38,210 --> 00:50:39,560
you might have.

575
00:50:39,560 --> 00:50:44,790
Professor Dawkins, we're very pleased to hear that you're writing a children's book on the

576
00:50:44,790 --> 00:50:50,820
beauty of science. We'd like both of you to write one for adults or a video special on

577
00:50:50,820 --> 00:50:55,710
TV because we don't want this wonder and awe that you all have been discussing today to

578
00:50:55,710 --> 00:51:04,720
be co-opted by religious people in the world, and it is really wonderful. What can we do

579
00:51:04,720 --> 00:51:10,770
to spread the word that science is not something to be afraid of, but something to really be

580
00:51:10,770 --> 00:51:11,670
in wonder of?

581
00:51:11,670 --> 00:51:12,280
Right.

582
00:51:12,280 --> 00:51:17,940
Can I just slip in there? You commented that there's a children book, and we need one for

583
00:51:17,940 --> 00:51:25,630
adults. Indeed, we need one of those for adults. Interestingly, we probably don't need it for

584
00:51:25,630 --> 00:51:31,690
children because children are born inquisitors of their natural world. They turn over rocks.

585
00:51:31,690 --> 00:51:35,650
They jump in puddles. They pour water down your back.

586
00:51:35,650 --> 00:51:41,680
They do things that are odd by...you can look at it as wreaking havoc in the house, or you

587
00:51:41,680 --> 00:51:47,510
can look at it as a long series of science experiments, some of them gone playfully wrong,

588
00:51:47,510 --> 00:51:51,820
but nonetheless, explorations into the natural world. What happens is, over time, that gets

589
00:51:51,820 --> 00:51:56,830
beaten out of them because that is not the behavior of...not the sign of obedience. That's

590
00:51:56,830 --> 00:52:03,070
the behavior or disarray, plus adults far outnumber children, so I think the real problem

591
00:52:03,070 --> 00:52:09,940
in the world is adults, especially since they control the world, not the kids.

592
00:52:09,940 --> 00:52:14,849
What I would say about how we convey the wonder, which you and I are both extremely interested

593
00:52:14,849 --> 00:52:21,450
in doing that, and following your mentor Carl Sagan, for example. I like to make a distinction

594
00:52:21,450 --> 00:52:28,260
between what I call these two schools of why we should pursue the space race, space exploration.

595
00:52:28,260 --> 00:52:34,119
The nonstick frying pan way, which is it's useful because you get spinoffs like nonstick

596
00:52:34,119 --> 00:52:40,849
frying pans, and it's wonderful. I go for the wonderful part, and I find that one of

597
00:52:40,849 --> 00:52:45,760
the problems with people who attempt to convey science to lay people, whether it's children

598
00:52:45,760 --> 00:52:49,990
or adults, is that they tend to be obsessed with bringing it down to earth and making

599
00:52:49,990 --> 00:52:55,040
it ordinary and mundane and the sort of thing you might meet in your own kitchen.

600
00:52:55,040 --> 00:53:02,820
I'm glad somebody's doing that, but for me, I prefer the wide open spaces of space, the

601
00:53:02,820 --> 00:53:07,420
wonder of looking down a microscope at the very small and thinking about it from a sort

602
00:53:07,420 --> 00:53:13,460
of more poetic point of view rather than from a more utilitarian point of view.

603
00:53:13,460 --> 00:53:19,770
Hi. First, I'd like to say thank you. This is very stimulating, and it's wonderful to

604
00:53:19,770 --> 00:53:29,170
have this here at Crampton Auditorium, at Howard University. I have a practical application

605
00:53:29,170 --> 00:53:36,869
question for technology and its impact on humans, specifically cell phones, cellular

606
00:53:36,869 --> 00:53:37,680
cell phones.

607
00:53:37,680 --> 00:53:45,480
I'm in healthcare, and I'd like to know where you stand on the effects...and I know we've

608
00:53:45,480 --> 00:53:51,330
come a long way since the first cell phones came out, but I get particularly apprehensive

609
00:53:51,330 --> 00:53:55,440
when I see young people putting cell phones to the heads of little infants and saying,

610
00:53:55,440 --> 00:54:01,730
“Talk to Daddy,” or something like that. That's my first question, the impact of the

611
00:54:01,730 --> 00:54:09,550
waves and things like that, which is out...I've look at some studies on human beings.

612
00:54:09,550 --> 00:54:15,830
Then, my second question is about the references for the origins of calculus in the Egyptian

613
00:54:15,830 --> 00:54:18,589
culture. Thank you.

614
00:54:18,589 --> 00:54:22,650
Okay, given how many people are in line, I think we should try to answer as quickly as

615
00:54:22,650 --> 00:54:26,740
possible to do this, and I'll take a first stab, and if you want to try that as well.

616
00:54:26,740 --> 00:54:32,810
I don't know of any first efforts at calculus in the Egyptian culture. Perhaps Richard does.

617
00:54:32,810 --> 00:54:38,760
And with regard to cell phone use, there's a very important fact of science, and that

618
00:54:38,760 --> 00:54:46,240
is the active measurement...it's a fascinating thing, measurement. Because you can never

619
00:54:46,240 --> 00:54:53,240
measure anything precisely, that is, with unlimited precision. You can only measure

620
00:54:53,240 --> 00:54:55,760
it with the uncertainties of your measuring device.

621
00:54:55,760 --> 00:55:02,630
And all you can do in the lab is try to constrain how uncertain that measurement is; but at

622
00:55:02,630 --> 00:55:08,890
some level, it will always be uncertain. And here's what happens. If you're trying to measure

623
00:55:08,890 --> 00:55:16,589
a phenomenon that does not exist, the variations in your measurement will occasionally give

624
00:55:16,589 --> 00:55:20,750
you a positive signal, as well as a negative signal.

625
00:55:20,750 --> 00:55:28,210
If that positive signal is the idea that maybe A causes B, in this case, cell phones cause

626
00:55:28,210 --> 00:55:37,240
cancer, a paper gets written about that result, and then, people get concerned that cell phones

627
00:55:37,240 --> 00:55:42,609
might cause cancer or power lines might cause cancer. This goes way back. In fact, if you

628
00:55:42,609 --> 00:55:47,339
look at the full spate of these studies, even those that they fought not to publish because

629
00:55:47,339 --> 00:55:52,010
there was not a positive effect, there are some cases where, in fact, there is less cancer.

630
00:55:52,010 --> 00:55:59,060
And so, these are the phenomenon of a no result. When you actually have A causing B, the signal

631
00:55:59,060 --> 00:56:06,290
is huge. It is huge, and it's repeatable in time and in place. With cell phones, that

632
00:56:06,290 --> 00:56:12,710
repeatable signal is yet to emerge from the total experiments that are done on it. That

633
00:56:12,710 --> 00:56:17,160
being said, if you are worried, almost every cell phone you can have...you know, they have

634
00:56:17,160 --> 00:56:23,119
the cell phones on your hip, and you've got an ear piece, so just do that if you're worried.

635
00:56:23,119 --> 00:56:30,140
Otherwise, I can either say the jury's still out, or the experimental results are consistent

636
00:56:30,140 --> 00:56:32,200
with no effect at all.

637
00:56:32,200 --> 00:56:35,740
I have nothing to add to that.

638
00:56:35,740 --> 00:56:38,619
About the calculus in Egypt...

639
00:56:38,619 --> 00:56:40,640
Can we have this one now?

640
00:56:40,640 --> 00:56:46,730
Yes, I was interested when you were speaking about the bubble of radio waves, as far as

641
00:56:46,730 --> 00:56:52,930
the limitation of our communication. I read recently that the Large Hadron Collider had

642
00:56:52,930 --> 00:57:01,920
some crazy experiments, but there apparently are particles that are seemingly unconnected

643
00:57:01,920 --> 00:57:07,050
but they react to each other in symmetrical patterns of some kind. I'm very amateurish

644
00:57:07,050 --> 00:57:13,880
on this, but what do you think would be the possibility of instantaneous communication

645
00:57:13,880 --> 00:57:19,310
across vast distances using some kind of particle manipulation?

646
00:57:19,310 --> 00:57:25,849
That's exactly an example of the kind of thing I meant when I said it's beyond me, so...

647
00:57:25,849 --> 00:57:33,400
Yeah, so quantum physics is the physics of the world of the small. In fact, quantum rules

648
00:57:33,400 --> 00:57:39,940
apply macroscopically, but they don't reveal themselves as exotically as what happens with

649
00:57:39,940 --> 00:57:45,160
single particles. A particle can pop into existence, go out of existence, what we call

650
00:57:45,160 --> 00:57:51,170
tunnel from one place to another, instantly, with no time delay between the two. It could

651
00:57:51,170 --> 00:57:56,420
exist in all places at once and then show up instantaneously here when you make the

652
00:57:56,420 --> 00:57:57,040
measurement.

653
00:57:57,040 --> 00:58:01,570
These are quantum rules that don't make any sense to us because we don't live in a quantum

654
00:58:01,570 --> 00:58:06,810
world. If we did, these would be phenomena that would be quite natural. So now, can we

655
00:58:06,810 --> 00:58:13,890
exploit the quantum world for faster-than-light communication is what you are suggesting here;

656
00:58:13,890 --> 00:58:20,440
and there's no known way to do that, given the laws of physics. In other words, you can

657
00:58:20,440 --> 00:58:27,500
have what's called a wave form, a wave function of a particle, and it's everywhere.

658
00:58:27,500 --> 00:58:31,839
You make a measurement, and the particle instantly shows up here, even though the wave had a

659
00:58:31,839 --> 00:58:36,880
probability of existing...the particle had a probability of existing over here. And so,

660
00:58:36,880 --> 00:58:43,359
it's just odd, and we don't know how to exploit that fact to our advantage; but as far as

661
00:58:43,359 --> 00:58:48,440
we know, no, you cannot have faster-than-light communication, which we would desperately

662
00:58:48,440 --> 00:58:51,950
need to get bigger than the bubble to talk to the rest of the galaxy.

663
00:58:51,950 --> 00:58:56,880
Again, I'll try to make my answers even shorter than that.

664
00:58:56,880 --> 00:59:01,619
Making the distinction between life in the universe, which I think is inevitable, and

665
00:59:01,619 --> 00:59:08,200
intelligent life in the universe, which I question or challenge at least the probability

666
00:59:08,200 --> 00:59:15,070
of, given our planet being in the right location, the star being the right type of star in the

667
00:59:15,070 --> 00:59:20,310
right location, etc., what are the odds that you would...and given the time it took, four-and-a-half

668
00:59:20,310 --> 00:59:25,119
billion, 4.6 billion years...for us to get to the point where we can ask the question

669
00:59:25,119 --> 00:59:30,920
is there intelligent life in the universe. What do you think those odds are?

670
00:59:30,920 --> 00:59:36,770
The universe is huge, in time and in space and in content. So, the good thing about the

671
00:59:36,770 --> 00:59:44,960
universe is extraordinarily rare phenomena happen every day someplace in the universe.

672
00:59:44,960 --> 00:59:51,210
So however rare we might calculate it would be here for life as we know it, you multiply

673
00:59:51,210 --> 00:59:56,430
up the numbers...stars in the galaxies, galaxies in the universe...these are staggeringly huge

674
00:59:56,430 --> 01:00:03,440
numbers, 1021 stars, 1,000 times bigger than the number of grains of sand on an average

675
01:00:03,440 --> 01:00:09,480
beach, itself 100 times bigger than the number of words ever spoken or uttered by all humans

676
01:00:09,480 --> 01:00:11,140
who have ever lived.

677
01:00:11,140 --> 01:00:16,930
These are staggeringly large, stupendously large numbers, to use Richard's word, that

678
01:00:16,930 --> 01:00:22,770
give us the confidence that, even if intelligent life is only short lived, grows up, and then,

679
01:00:22,770 --> 01:00:28,310
grows so smart it kill itself, that there's bound to be one out there that we're hitting

680
01:00:28,310 --> 01:00:32,579
it right at the right time that they are happy to have a conversation with us, if we're smart

681
01:00:32,579 --> 01:00:35,520
enough to have a conversation with them.

682
01:00:35,520 --> 01:00:40,119
This question is primarily for Professor Dawkins. I come from a family where there are two skeptics

683
01:00:40,119 --> 01:00:46,020
and three religious fruitcakes. You can guess which side I'm on. Anyhow, I was just wondering,

684
01:00:46,020 --> 01:00:51,369
with your experience, if you've ever found a good way to hit the fruitcakes upside the

685
01:00:51,369 --> 01:00:56,920
head with some rational thinking and actually get them to pay attention.

686
01:00:56,920 --> 01:01:03,160
It would be nice to say that all we need to do is to expose them to scientific evidence,

687
01:01:03,160 --> 01:01:07,550
and that's certainly a very important part of it is what Neil and I both are trying to

688
01:01:07,550 --> 01:01:11,130
do. Unfortunately, there's a certain amount of evidence that there's a certain kind of

689
01:01:11,130 --> 01:01:20,400
mind which is so dyed-in-the-wool wedded to a scriptural version of the world that they

690
01:01:20,400 --> 01:01:28,119
more or less admit in advance that, no matter what evidence comes, they will refuse to budge.

691
01:01:28,119 --> 01:01:32,690
My favorite example of this is the geologist Kurt Wise, who is a young earth creationist,

692
01:01:32,690 --> 01:01:38,170
but who knows very well all the evidence for an old earth from geology. He has actually

693
01:01:38,170 --> 01:01:43,310
said, in these very words; I think I quote him approximately right, “If all the evidence

694
01:01:43,310 --> 01:01:51,660
in the universe pointed to an old earth, I would be the first to recognize the evidence,

695
01:01:51,660 --> 01:01:56,020
but I would still be a young earth creationist because that is what Holy Scripture tells

696
01:01:56,020 --> 01:01:57,770
me.”

697
01:01:57,770 --> 01:02:02,230
Somebody who's actually prepared to come out and say that, and at least he's honest...somebody

698
01:02:02,230 --> 01:02:09,970
who actually comes out and says that is pretty much advertising himself as beyond reason.

699
01:02:09,970 --> 01:02:16,440
He's absented himself from the rational discussion which the rest of us are having by announcing

700
01:02:16,440 --> 01:02:22,619
in advance that scripture is going to take precedence over evidence. And here's a man

701
01:02:22,619 --> 01:02:29,020
who knows the evidence. He has a Ph.D. from Harvard in geology. He knows the evidence,

702
01:02:29,020 --> 01:02:34,490
and yet, he's announced in advance, so there are certain people who are unreachable; but

703
01:02:34,490 --> 01:02:39,470
my hope is that the vast majority of people are imminently reachable and just simply haven't

704
01:02:39,470 --> 01:02:46,020
been exposed to the evidence which is plentiful and wonderful.

705
01:02:46,020 --> 01:02:48,099
Next question here.

706
01:02:48,099 --> 01:02:52,310
Thanks for the great job on the Poetry of Science. I wonder if you could say just a

707
01:02:52,310 --> 01:02:57,640
few words, both of you, on the philosophy of science. I just read Stephen Hawking's

708
01:02:57,640 --> 01:03:04,380
book, The Grand Design. The first page, philosophy is dead; and here at Howard, our administration

709
01:03:04,380 --> 01:03:09,690
is proposing the abolition of our philosophy programs. Could you say a few words?

710
01:03:09,690 --> 01:03:17,119
I have a couple of words to say about that. Up until early 20th century, philosophers

711
01:03:17,119 --> 01:03:24,730
had material contributions to make to the physical sciences. Pretty much after quantum

712
01:03:24,730 --> 01:03:30,910
mechanics, remember the philosopher is the would-be scientist but without a laboratory,

713
01:03:30,910 --> 01:03:38,220
right? So, what happens is the 1920s come in. We learn about the expanding universe

714
01:03:38,220 --> 01:03:43,210
in the same decade as we learn about quantum physics, each of which falls so far out of

715
01:03:43,210 --> 01:03:48,240
what you can deduce from your armchair that the whole community of philosophers that previously

716
01:03:48,240 --> 01:03:53,050
had added materially to the thinking of the physical scientist were rendered essentially

717
01:03:53,050 --> 01:03:54,980
obsolete at that point.

718
01:03:54,980 --> 01:04:00,660
I have yet to see the contribution...this will get me in trouble with all manner of

719
01:04:00,660 --> 01:04:09,740
philosophers, but call me later and correct me if you think I missed somebody here, but

720
01:04:09,740 --> 01:04:15,560
philosophy has basically parted ways from the frontier of the physical sciences, when

721
01:04:15,560 --> 01:04:19,490
there was a day when they were one and the same. Isaac Newton was a natural philosopher.

722
01:04:19,490 --> 01:04:23,750
The work physicist didn't even exist in any important way back then.

723
01:04:23,750 --> 01:04:27,540
I'm disappointed because there's a lot of brain power there that might have otherwise

724
01:04:27,540 --> 01:04:34,250
contributed mightily, but today simply does not. The philosophy has other...not that there

725
01:04:34,250 --> 01:04:39,400
can't be other philosophical subjects. There's religious philosophy and ethical philosophy

726
01:04:39,400 --> 01:04:43,589
and political philosophy, plenty of stuff for the philosopher to do, but the frontier

727
01:04:43,589 --> 01:04:46,910
of the physical sciences does not appear to be among them.

728
01:04:46,910 --> 01:04:50,970
Even in biology, I think, is an interesting point that the idea of evolution by natural

729
01:04:50,970 --> 01:04:59,030
selection, which came independently to two traveling naturalists in the 19th century.

730
01:04:59,030 --> 01:05:02,420
It's a simple enough idea that any philosopher could have thought of it from the depths of

731
01:05:02,420 --> 01:05:06,520
an armchair anywhere back to the Greeks, and none of them did.

732
01:05:06,520 --> 01:05:11,900
I don't really understand that. It seems to me to be a strange thing that it had to wait

733
01:05:11,900 --> 01:05:16,609
to 19th century scientists, living 200 years after Newton did something that seemed a lot

734
01:05:16,609 --> 01:05:19,319
more difficult.

735
01:05:19,319 --> 01:05:28,560
Check Anaxagoras, first theory of evolution in pre-Socratic Greece.

736
01:05:28,560 --> 01:05:35,260
Oh, well, okay. But natural selection is something that came in the 19th...not just to Darwin

737
01:05:35,260 --> 01:05:38,990
and Wallace. I mean, there were a couple of other scientists who thought of it.

738
01:05:38,990 --> 01:05:42,819
The philosophers that I really respect in the world today are philosophers of science,

739
01:05:42,819 --> 01:05:47,260
are ones who have actually taken the trouble to learn some science, and there are some.

740
01:05:47,260 --> 01:05:51,270
And they're very good, clear thinkers, and they do help other people to think clearly;

741
01:05:51,270 --> 01:05:56,480
but they're really the same as scientists. There are scientists who are also trained

742
01:05:56,480 --> 01:05:57,619
in philosophy.

743
01:05:57,619 --> 01:05:58,460
Sir.

744
01:05:58,460 --> 01:06:02,530
Thank you both for coming. There's a group of scientists in Europe that have developed

745
01:06:02,530 --> 01:06:06,700
a Large Hadron Collider, and they're trying to recreate the conditions of what has been

746
01:06:06,700 --> 01:06:11,700
known as the Big Bang, slamming antiprotons and protons to try and find a particle known

747
01:06:11,700 --> 01:06:16,000
as the Higgs boson, which has been misnamed the God particle. It's a particle that gives

748
01:06:16,000 --> 01:06:16,900
matter mass.

749
01:06:16,900 --> 01:06:21,900
Could you guys talk about the conditions of the universe at that time? Will this prove

750
01:06:21,900 --> 01:06:23,890
anything? This experiment?

751
01:06:23,890 --> 01:06:28,730
The interesting thing about physics is that there is very little physics left to be discovered

752
01:06:28,730 --> 01:06:33,890
on a tabletop. The way physics works is, the way discoveries in physics, by and large,

753
01:06:33,890 --> 01:06:40,540
work is you need to go someplace you've never been before, either in scale...large, small,

754
01:06:40,540 --> 01:06:46,690
energy especially, speed...once you've explored these extremes, you're at the hairy, bleeding

755
01:06:46,690 --> 01:06:49,750
edge between what is known and unknown in the universe.

756
01:06:49,750 --> 01:06:54,109
So, if you want to discover something you've never done before, build an accelerator that

757
01:06:54,109 --> 01:06:59,160
hits an energy level that's never been hit before. And the early universe is our best

758
01:06:59,160 --> 01:07:06,079
particle accelerator we know, so now we have the very large tabletop version of the early

759
01:07:06,079 --> 01:07:11,520
universe, large and expensive, and it allows us to test our ideas about what was going

760
01:07:11,520 --> 01:07:17,510
on. And so, yes. It's regime of the early universe that we have theoretical understanding

761
01:07:17,510 --> 01:07:21,920
of but we have yet to have experimental verification for it.

762
01:07:21,920 --> 01:07:27,390
I have visited the Large Hadron Collider twice; and on both occasions, I was more or less

763
01:07:27,390 --> 01:07:35,069
literally reduced to tears. I was moved so much by this stupendous effort of human ingenuity,

764
01:07:35,069 --> 01:07:46,010
human cooperation, multinational; and I attempted to express my poetic fascination and interest

765
01:07:46,010 --> 01:07:54,089
in this terrific enterprise in my latest book. There was an unfortunate misprint. It came

766
01:07:54,089 --> 01:07:56,369
out as the large Hardon collider.

767
01:07:56,369 --> 01:08:04,020
Just the D and the R, right?

768
01:08:04,020 --> 01:08:12,690
I spotted the misprint, and of course, I left it in; but alas, the publisher's proofreader

769
01:08:12,690 --> 01:08:19,029
also spotted it. She removed it. I begged her on my knees to leave it in. She said it

770
01:08:19,029 --> 01:08:20,980
was more than her job was worth.

771
01:08:20,980 --> 01:08:30,949
Just a quick social comment. The 1990's cancelled superconducting supercollider that was to

772
01:08:30,949 --> 01:08:36,519
be built in Texas had peak energies three times as large as the Large Hadron Collider

773
01:08:36,519 --> 01:08:42,259
in Switzerland. Congress voted to not continue its funding. The project was scrapped, and

774
01:08:42,259 --> 01:08:46,569
now, the center of mass of particle physics is no longer in the United States. It's in

775
01:08:46,569 --> 01:08:47,650
Europe.

776
01:08:47,650 --> 01:08:54,079
Now interesting to the scientists, while we'd rather it be here in America, we really celebrate

777
01:08:54,079 --> 01:08:59,569
the fact that science continues to advance, and it's just a matter of whose nation's priorities

778
01:08:59,569 --> 01:09:05,630
values it; and I saw that as the beginning of the end of America's leadership in this

779
01:09:05,630 --> 01:09:06,079
realm.

780
01:09:06,079 --> 01:09:06,539
Sure.

781
01:09:06,539 --> 01:09:12,999
All right. Thank you so much. I probably have a question which is rather mundane in this

782
01:09:12,999 --> 01:09:18,959
setting, but one doesn't get these opportunities very often. I wanted to see what you thought

783
01:09:18,959 --> 01:09:25,229
about this. Life that's been discovered at the point of sea floor spreading on earth

784
01:09:25,229 --> 01:09:31,529
is, I assume, because I haven't heard otherwise also DNA based, as is everything else we know

785
01:09:31,529 --> 01:09:38,719
of. My curiosity is whether there is a hypothesis or an explanation that has been, in fact,

786
01:09:38,719 --> 01:09:47,389
devised as to how DNA can have this effect with the distance of 5,000 or 6,000 miles

787
01:09:47,389 --> 01:09:51,809
in the ocean itself between that point and the surface.

788
01:09:51,809 --> 01:09:57,429
Not miles in the ocean. I mean, the diameter of the earth is only...you mean feet down?

789
01:09:57,429 --> 01:10:01,300
I'm sorry. Five or six miles.

790
01:10:01,300 --> 01:10:03,239
Yes, thank you.

791
01:10:03,239 --> 01:10:04,070
Exclude the thousand.

792
01:10:04,070 --> 01:10:07,760
Okay. I can give an astrophysicist's view, but I'd welcome the biologist.

793
01:10:07,760 --> 01:10:11,119
I didn't actually hear the question, so you start off by...

794
01:10:11,119 --> 01:10:16,369
Sure. So, these extremophiles...these are creatures that thrive under conditions that

795
01:10:16,369 --> 01:10:21,010
would kill the rest of us instantly, under high pressure, high temperature. In fact,

796
01:10:21,010 --> 01:10:25,800
at the ocean vents, they're thriving at 300 degrees Fahrenheit. The pressure of the water

797
01:10:25,800 --> 01:10:30,099
is high enough to prevent boiling, but the temperature is high enough that it would cook

798
01:10:30,099 --> 01:10:31,489
anything else.

799
01:10:31,489 --> 01:10:39,539
One of the great advances in exobiology was the discovery that life on earth is hardier

800
01:10:39,539 --> 01:10:45,030
than anyone had ever previously given it credit. We no longer need the room-temperature pond

801
01:10:45,030 --> 01:10:49,820
water to have life thrive. The more we've looked in the earth, the more we have found

802
01:10:49,820 --> 01:10:55,670
life doing the backstroke under extraordinarily hostile conditions, hostile to humans that

803
01:10:55,670 --> 01:10:56,499
is.

804
01:10:56,499 --> 01:11:02,969
What that has done for us, astrophysically, is allow us to cast for life with a much wider

805
01:11:02,969 --> 01:11:08,559
net than we had previously thought we had available to us. Whereas before we would look

806
01:11:08,559 --> 01:11:13,519
in the habitable zone, the Goldilocks zone; not too close to a host star, you water would

807
01:11:13,519 --> 01:11:18,320
evaporate; not too far away, water freezes. You're looking for that liquid water zone

808
01:11:18,320 --> 01:11:23,090
made liquid by sunlight. We find out all we really need is an energy source. It doesn't

809
01:11:23,090 --> 01:11:24,369
have to be the sun.

810
01:11:24,369 --> 01:11:28,949
Jupiter keeps Europa warm, one of its moons. It has a liquid ocean. It's been liquid for

811
01:11:28,949 --> 01:11:35,289
billions of years. You want to look for life armed with this diversity of life, the hardiness

812
01:11:35,289 --> 01:11:42,010
of life, even we find here on earth. It has only broadened our search for life in the

813
01:11:42,010 --> 01:11:42,409
cosmos.

814
01:11:42,409 --> 01:11:48,150
Among the many theories of the origin of life, recently people have started thinking about

815
01:11:48,150 --> 01:11:52,860
life might possibly have started under what we now think of as extreme conditions of high

816
01:11:52,860 --> 01:11:57,639
temperature, and it could be that we are now in the cold zone, which was not the way it

817
01:11:57,639 --> 01:11:59,530
was when it first started, and that's an interesting possibility.

818
01:11:59,530 --> 01:12:01,840
So, they would look at us like we're the extremophiles.

819
01:12:01,840 --> 01:12:06,380
Exactly. They look at us as though we're the extremophiles.

820
01:12:06,380 --> 01:12:09,469
MS: My department chairman said that he wants you to go and ask your question. I'm not going

821
01:12:09,469 --> 01:12:14,159
to tell him no, so please ask your question. Keep it brief, and this is the last one before

822
01:12:14,159 --> 01:12:15,599
we go onto the book signing.

823
01:12:15,599 --> 01:12:21,380
Thank you, Howard, for making this free. Anyway, I read a book Consolation of Philosophy. The

824
01:12:21,380 --> 01:12:26,090
main guy, Boethius, is condemned to death. He has everything taken from him. All he has

825
01:12:26,090 --> 01:12:34,090
is his reason and his sense of self, not even that; but he attempts to console himself to

826
01:12:34,090 --> 01:12:43,820
this execution by reasoning that the world has order, that there is something that keeps

827
01:12:43,820 --> 01:12:49,599
things together. He uses his reason to try and get to the root of why he should be at

828
01:12:49,599 --> 01:12:56,630
peace with death. The problem is his source of origin is a belief in God. What would you

829
01:12:56,630 --> 01:13:00,719
do?

830
01:13:00,719 --> 01:13:10,179
Well, I don't know if I fully understand the question. I do know that, if he's about to

831
01:13:10,179 --> 01:13:10,979
be executed...

832
01:13:10,979 --> 01:13:14,150
How about you are about to be executed?

833
01:13:14,150 --> 01:13:16,599
Oh, I'm about to be executed.

834
01:13:16,599 --> 01:13:23,139
You have nothing except your knowledge, your knowledge of science, your experience.

835
01:13:23,139 --> 01:13:34,409
I would request that my body in death be buried, not cremated so that the energy content contained

836
01:13:34,409 --> 01:13:40,579
within it gets returned to the earth, so that flora and fauna can dine upon it just as I've

837
01:13:40,579 --> 01:13:45,579
dined upon flora and fauna throughout my life.

838
01:13:45,579 --> 01:13:57,639
What about you, Professor Dawkins?

839
01:13:57,639 --> 01:15:52,519
END OF AUDIO FILE STAGE 2 PRODUCTIONS

840
01:15:52,519 --> 01:16:37,380
DAWKINS TYSON

841
01:16:37,380 --> 99:59:59,999
1