WEBVTT

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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.

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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

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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

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point, I think in 1919, that to the world of an insect, gravity is negligible.

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A completely...it's who cares?

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What matters is surface tension, and you'd have to be...I never thought of that, but

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what I'd do...

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That's because you didn't see the move Bug's Life, okay?

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Okay.

00:20:37.330 --> 00:20:43.760
In Bug's Life, they serve up a cocktail to an insect that goes up to a bar, and all the

00:20:43.760 --> 00:20:49.170
bartender does is pour out water from a spigot and hand him the ball of water, like that,

00:20:49.170 --> 00:20:53.820
and the surface...this was brilliant of the cartoonist, of the illustrator, and then,

00:20:53.820 --> 00:20:59.130
he sticks a straw into the sphere and sucks it out. No receptacle needed. You got to get

00:20:59.130 --> 00:21:01.800
out more.

00:21:01.800 --> 00:21:11.100
Well, I imagine my surgeon of the future being armed with a virtual saw, one of those...what

00:21:11.100 --> 00:21:20.000
are those things you cut trees down with...band saws, and what's really going on is a tiny

00:21:20.000 --> 00:21:29.040
little micro scalpel inside, but the surgeon is wielding an axe, and it's all done by virtual

00:21:29.040 --> 00:21:30.700
entity.

00:21:30.700 --> 00:21:37.140
I've got a question back to you. I lose sleep over this, and I've always wanted to be in

00:21:37.140 --> 00:21:45.790
the company of a leading biologist to get insight into this. As an astrophysicist, we've

00:21:45.790 --> 00:21:54.130
seen throughout time the hubris that comes with any discovery that gets made, or the

00:21:54.130 --> 00:22:01.000
hubris that prevents the acceptance of a discovery that might demote your sense of self from

00:22:01.000 --> 00:22:03.610
whatever you previously imagined it to be.

00:22:03.610 --> 00:22:09.320
Among them is where is earth? Is it the center of all things? No. It's not even a significant

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

00:22:15.440 --> 00:22:22.740
hundred billion galaxies in the universe. And so, here we are saying let's search life

00:22:22.740 --> 00:22:29.880
in the universe, intelligent life like us. Well, who are we to say that we're intelligent?

00:22:29.880 --> 00:22:37.640
I pose that not as a joke questions, but as a very serious question. We define ourselves

00:22:37.640 --> 00:22:46.140
to be intelligent in ways that no other creature can rival. Okay, now, what do we credit that

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

00:22:51.330 --> 00:22:58.330
really close relative of ours, and we have...what is it? High 90's percent identical, indistinguishable

00:22:58.330 --> 00:23:03.220
DNA, and the chimp does not build the Hubble telescope, and the chimp does not compose

00:23:03.220 --> 00:23:09.570
symphonies. So, we must then declare that everything we say about us that is intelligent

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

00:23:14.350 --> 00:23:15.060
make?

00:23:15.060 --> 00:23:15.770
Yes.

00:23:15.770 --> 00:23:22.510
Okay. Let me invert that question. If the genetic difference between humans and chimps

00:23:22.510 --> 00:23:29.270
is that small, maybe the difference in our intelligence is also that small. Maybe the

00:23:29.270 --> 00:23:35.500
difference between stacking boxes and reaching a banana, putting up an umbrella when it rains,

00:23:35.500 --> 00:23:40.060
whatever are these rudimentary things a chimp does that the primatologists roll them forward

00:23:40.060 --> 00:23:45.720
and boast about, which of course, our toddlers can do, maybe the difference between that

00:23:45.720 --> 00:23:49.840
and the Hubble telescope is as small as that difference in DNA.

00:23:49.840 --> 00:23:55.000
I pose the question: suppose there was another life form on earth or elsewhere that, in that

00:23:55.000 --> 00:24:00.660
same sort of vector, that one-and-a-half percent difference we are to chimps, suppose they

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

00:24:06.730 --> 00:24:14.770
in front of their hematologists and say, Hawking, there's Hawking. Oh, this one is slightly

00:24:14.770 --> 00:24:20.440
smarter than the rest of them because he can do astrophysics calculations in his head.

00:24:20.440 --> 00:24:24.220
Like little Timmy over here.

00:24:24.220 --> 00:24:33.680
So, I wonder if we're just blithering idiots in the presence of even a trivially smarter

00:24:33.680 --> 00:24:40.520
species than us. Therefore, who are we to even assert that, number one, we are intelligent,

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.

00:24:45.550 --> 00:24:50.900
By the way, is there any other species on earth that we can talk to? Can we have a conversation

00:24:50.900 --> 00:24:56.220
with a chimp? That has identical DNA, and I don't think we can actually say, hey, what

00:24:56.220 --> 00:25:00.250
movie do you want to see tonight? You don't have that conversation with a chimp. Yet somehow,

00:25:00.250 --> 00:25:06.000
we believe, we want to believe that an alien on another planet that's not even based on

00:25:06.000 --> 00:25:11.550
DNA and, even if it is, it's not nothing like us, that we could communicate with it.

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?

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

00:25:26.880 --> 00:25:32.350
anatomically very, very much bigger than chimps, and so that also must be contained in some

00:25:32.350 --> 00:25:37.110
sense in that tiny little percentage of DNA. I think the way to sort of look at the DNA

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

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

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

00:26:00.420 --> 00:26:01.980
out the same set of subroutines.

00:26:01.980 --> 00:26:06.690
There's a subroutine for pulling down menu bars and a subroutine for moving windows and

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

00:26:13.750 --> 00:26:18.350
set of sort of high-level instructions that say call this subroutine now, now call this

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

00:26:22.140 --> 00:26:29.059
mammals have pretty much the same repertoire of genetic subroutines.

00:26:29.059 --> 00:26:32.870
The difference between a man and a mouse, like the difference the difference between

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

00:26:37.900 --> 00:26:43.350
called during embryology which causes the really quite substantial anatomical differences

00:26:43.350 --> 00:26:48.860
between a human and a mouse and the quite big differences in brain size.

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

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

00:27:02.000 --> 00:27:05.890
invent whole new sequences never before dreamt of by biology?

00:27:05.890 --> 00:27:07.090
Yep, absolutely.

00:27:07.090 --> 00:27:09.390
Empowering us in ways never before...

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

00:27:13.880 --> 00:27:20.309
in principle possible. But the other point about intelligent life in the universe, never

00:27:20.309 --> 00:27:27.120
mind how we define intelligence. We're only going to encounter them if they are intelligent

00:27:27.120 --> 00:27:31.520
enough either to come here, which is very difficult indeed, or to send radio transmissions

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

00:27:37.290 --> 00:27:40.780
in order send information across the universe.

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

00:27:44.679 --> 00:27:48.820
order to get here, in order for us to apprehend it.

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

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

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

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

00:28:07.600 --> 00:28:15.570
is thinking; and conversely, the worm has no clue that you consider yourself intelligent.

00:28:15.570 --> 00:28:17.309
You're just this thing that went by.

00:28:17.309 --> 00:28:23.559
So, can you imagine a species that has such high intelligence that the prospect of communicating

00:28:23.559 --> 00:28:25.890
with us is simply of no interest to them?

00:28:25.890 --> 00:28:26.980
Yeah, I can. Yeah.

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

00:28:31.750 --> 00:28:32.960
it as intelligence.

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

00:28:37.980 --> 00:28:40.400
ever to meet them because we're never going to get there.

00:28:40.400 --> 00:28:47.360
Yeah, we sure as hell ain't getting there. See the massive budget lately? If not...

00:28:47.360 --> 00:28:52.400
So, anything that gets here has got to have a very, very highly-developed technology,

00:28:52.400 --> 00:28:54.450
far more than we've...

00:28:54.450 --> 00:28:58.760
That brings us to Stephen Hawking's concern about any civilization sufficiently advanced

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,

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

00:29:09.260 --> 00:29:15.340
advanced technology than the other, and they visit, it almost is always bad for those with

00:29:15.340 --> 00:29:21.790
the lesser technology. South America, one of the more obvious examples, in their first

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

00:29:28.250 --> 00:29:37.130
hands...shake whatever appendage...whatever they're sticking forward, I don't know...

00:29:37.130 --> 00:29:43.000
I want to do it, but I still have my concerns.

00:29:43.000 --> 00:29:46.760
What do you think are the odds that there is life elsewhere in the universe?

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?

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,

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

00:30:05.730 --> 00:30:13.640
know? You need a slightly bigger sample.

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

00:30:18.050 --> 00:30:23.929
earth, centered on earth, which is the farthest our radio signals have reached in the galaxy.

00:30:23.929 --> 00:30:29.220
They're about 70 light years away. We've been transmitting radio signals, inadvertently

00:30:29.220 --> 00:30:34.780
leaking into space, for about 70 years. Seventy light year radius sphere.

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,

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

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

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

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

00:31:02.440 --> 00:31:04.700
intelligent living today.

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

00:31:12.500 --> 00:31:17.770
of the earth and the earliest sign of fossil life. Subtract a few hundred million years

00:31:17.770 --> 00:31:22.690
at the beginning of earth when earth was a shooting gallery, earth was still excreting

00:31:22.690 --> 00:31:29.140
the birth materials of the solar system. It's hostile to complex chemistry over that time;

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,

00:31:33.980 --> 00:31:39.049
and wait around and see when you have the first signs of single-celled life.

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.

00:31:47.240 --> 00:31:55.049
So earth, without any help from us, with basic ingredients found throughout the universe,

00:31:55.049 --> 00:32:05.580
managed to create life, simple though it was. And earth, one of eight planets...get over

00:32:05.580 --> 00:32:16.500
it...sorry. Earth around an ordinary star?

00:32:16.500 --> 00:32:21.340
To suggest...and what are the ingredients of life? The number one atom in your body

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

00:32:27.410 --> 00:32:34.640
carbon in this order. Next is nitrogen. Next is other stuff. My favorite element, other.

00:32:34.640 --> 00:32:35.290
Yeah?

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,

00:32:39.900 --> 00:32:44.720
chemically inert, couldn't do anything with it anyway. Next is carbon. I think I left

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

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

00:32:57.390 --> 00:33:00.480
made of them.

00:33:00.480 --> 00:33:05.830
And carbon? The most chemically fertile element on the periodic table? It's not a surprise

00:33:05.830 --> 00:33:14.179
we're carbon-based. Life is just the extreme expression of complex chemistry. That's what

00:33:14.179 --> 00:33:21.870
biology is. All these people who want to imagine, because they remembered the chemistry class

00:33:21.870 --> 00:33:29.040
that silicon sits right below carbon on the periodic table, so it bonds similarly to carbon,

00:33:29.040 --> 00:33:31.400
so they want to imagine silicon-based life.

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

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

00:33:43.190 --> 00:33:49.650
imagine just simply with the carbon atom at the center of these huge biological molecules.

00:33:49.650 --> 00:33:53.880
Point is, it happened relatively quickly with the most common ingredients in the universe.

00:33:53.880 --> 00:33:59.440
To now say life on earth is unique in the universe would be inexcusably egocentric.

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

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

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

00:34:18.510 --> 00:34:24.820
be a quite stupefyingly rare and improbable event, and that would have the rather odd

00:34:24.820 --> 00:34:32.679
consequence that, when chemists try to work out theories, models of the origin of life,

00:34:32.679 --> 00:34:38.550
what they should be looking for is a stupendously improbable theory, an implausible theory.

00:34:38.550 --> 00:34:41.220
If there was a plausible theory of the origin of life...

00:34:41.220 --> 00:34:42.820
...it wouldn't be it.

00:34:42.820 --> 00:34:50.770
That's right because then life would have to be everywhere. Now maybe it is everywhere.

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

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

00:35:01.869 --> 00:35:05.100
anyone of them will meet any other, which is rather sad.

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

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

00:35:15.410 --> 00:35:21.869
was being bombarded heavily...that's called the period of heavy bombardment in the early

00:35:21.869 --> 00:35:32.680
universe. We call it like we see it in astrophysics, let the record show.

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

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

00:35:47.560 --> 00:35:52.859
too big, too many syllables. I'm off topic here, so...

00:35:52.859 --> 00:35:59.300
The period of heavy bombardment and, with computer simulations you can model what happens

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

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

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.

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

00:36:22.859 --> 00:36:30.330
for life before earth. At this period of heavy bombardment, if it had started life, surely

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

00:36:35.030 --> 00:36:37.900
bacteria can be quite hardy, as you surely know.

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

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

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.

00:36:56.630 --> 00:37:03.100
Maybe one of those rocks carried life from Mars to earth, seeding life on earth.

00:37:03.100 --> 00:37:09.480
My great disappointment would be going to Mars and finding Mars life based on DNA. Then

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

00:37:13.790 --> 00:37:18.320
get over the fact that we are Martian descendants.

00:37:18.320 --> 00:37:22.920
What we need is a second sample of life. We have only one at present.

00:37:22.920 --> 00:37:24.780
Why have you only given us one?

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

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

00:37:35.830 --> 00:37:45.820
evolving twice, but you couldn't imagine the same four-letter code evolving twice.

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

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

00:37:58.900 --> 00:38:03.780
waves capable of being detected elsewhere in the universe, it took approximately just

00:38:03.780 --> 00:38:12.970
under four billion years. Well no, about four billion years, which is about half the life

00:38:12.970 --> 00:38:16.510
that we can expect the solar system to exist.

00:38:16.510 --> 00:38:24.210
Sure. An important point, by the way, because we were human before we had the technology

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

00:38:30.940 --> 00:38:35.250
the measure of intelligence, then there could be plenty of planets out there with Roman

00:38:35.250 --> 00:38:40.270
Empires and whatever else and them not sending radio signals; but any close enough observer

00:38:40.270 --> 00:38:42.750
would surely declare them to be intelligent.

00:38:42.750 --> 00:38:47.750
The time interval between Roman Empires and radio signals is negligible compared to the

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,

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?

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

00:39:04.460 --> 00:39:05.030
the next...

00:39:05.030 --> 00:39:10.310
And you're even...there's an implicit assumption, that you're making inadvertently possibly,

00:39:10.310 --> 00:39:17.119
that intelligence is an inevitable consequence of the evolutionary record, and I'm skeptical

00:39:17.119 --> 00:39:21.290
of that because, if that were the case, what we call our intelligence would have happened

00:39:21.290 --> 00:39:26.250
multiple times in the fossil record, and it hasn't, whereas other things have shown up

00:39:26.250 --> 00:39:30.580
plenty of times, like the sense of sight and locomotion.

00:39:30.580 --> 00:39:35.880
There's some rather inventive ways things can get around the world. My favorite is the

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

00:39:41.980 --> 00:39:47.720
visiting earth, stumbling on a snake, the only creature it sees, right? And then, it

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

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

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

00:40:01.730 --> 00:40:06.800
the guy was on drugs. It's an ordinary snake, sitting here on our earth.

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

00:40:13.150 --> 00:40:17.570
who to blame for this, Hollywood or biologists that advised them. Hollywood aliens are way

00:40:17.570 --> 00:40:24.590
too anthropomorphic for me. Even ET, he had a head, shoulders, arms. Okay, he had three

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

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

00:40:33.730 --> 00:40:42.300
to think about the ways of being alive? I'm just so disappointed.

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.

00:40:46.320 --> 00:40:48.540
Did you see that movie?

00:40:48.540 --> 00:40:50.020
No, I don't see as many movies as you.

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

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.

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

00:41:11.300 --> 00:41:14.630
to try to create some kind of way of being alive.

00:41:14.630 --> 00:41:18.230
That's a very laudable attempt. It is very interesting to look around the animal kingdom

00:41:18.230 --> 00:41:22.990
and count up the number of times that some things have evolved. I mean, eyes several

00:41:22.990 --> 00:41:28.580
dozen times; ears quite a large number of times. Echo location, that's finding a way

00:41:28.580 --> 00:41:31.520
around by sonar, only four times.

00:41:31.520 --> 00:41:33.800
A bat and who else?

00:41:33.800 --> 00:41:40.630
A bat, whales, and two different groups of birds, cave-dwelling birds. And a few rudimentary

00:41:40.630 --> 00:41:46.349
examples in some shrews and sea lions, but really four different times. Intelligence

00:41:46.349 --> 00:41:50.550
and language of a human kind, only once, as you pointed out.

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

00:41:56.349 --> 00:41:57.740
have shown up many more times.

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

00:42:02.660 --> 00:42:09.160
about enough is to go around the animal kingdom, counting up the number of separate arisings

00:42:09.160 --> 00:42:13.540
of something because that does tell you something about what you might expect elsewhere in the

00:42:13.540 --> 00:42:21.040
universe. You'd expect eyes. You might expect echo location. Hypodermic syringes, stingers.

00:42:21.040 --> 00:42:26.859
About a couple of dozen...I'm talking about independent evolutions now. You talk about

00:42:26.859 --> 00:42:27.780
spiders...

00:42:27.780 --> 00:42:30.590
Our version of that would be called guns. Yeah.

00:42:30.590 --> 00:42:31.530
What?

00:42:31.530 --> 00:42:35.020
Our version of the hypodermic stinger would be called a gun, allowing you to sting someone

00:42:35.020 --> 00:42:35.349
with...

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.

00:42:42.750 --> 00:42:44.530
That's an interesting question.

00:42:44.530 --> 00:42:51.060
Another relevant point is look around the world at different island continents and say

00:42:51.060 --> 00:42:57.810
how similar are they? Look at Australia. The Australian mammals, for example; and there

00:42:57.810 --> 00:43:02.250
are very, very power similarities between Australian mammals, which evolved entirely

00:43:02.250 --> 00:43:08.300
independently of mammals in South America, independently again of mammals in Asia and

00:43:08.300 --> 00:43:08.630
Africa.

00:43:08.630 --> 00:43:15.480
Again, that gives you a kind of a clue for how predictable evolution is. Other worlds

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

00:43:19.869 --> 00:43:28.200
Hollywood aliens might not be that unimaginative. I mean, my colleague Simon Conway Morris has

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,

00:43:34.109 --> 00:43:41.150
big-brained, language-toting, hand-toting, forward-looking eyes for stereoscopy, pretty

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

00:43:45.190 --> 00:43:52.190
say, for that; but like him, I appreciate the power of natural selection.

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

00:44:04.780 --> 00:44:06.320
different list of things that matter.

00:44:06.320 --> 00:44:07.830
I think that's probably right.

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

00:44:11.500 --> 00:44:15.310
it; and so, the horse would be valuing that fact.

00:44:15.310 --> 00:44:18.490
Oh, I'm not denigrating horses at all.

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

00:44:25.880 --> 00:44:26.810
that you would want in an alien.

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

00:44:31.220 --> 00:44:36.530
but because they're us. I mean, we have stereoscopic vision. We have three-dimensional vision.

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.

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

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

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

00:44:59.790 --> 00:45:04.369
create a model of the world.

00:45:04.369 --> 00:45:07.140
They show that in the, forgive me, movie Daredevil.

00:45:07.140 --> 00:45:10.580
Do they have bats...?

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

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.

00:45:23.760 --> 00:45:24.590
There's the image of her...

00:45:24.590 --> 00:45:26.740
Okay, but my speculation is that bats hear...

00:45:26.740 --> 00:45:29.910
This is America. I've got to talk about our movies here, you know.

00:45:29.910 --> 00:45:34.950
My speculation is that bats hear in color because why wouldn't you use color? Color

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.

00:45:41.190 --> 00:45:46.080
Precisely. That's all it is. Color, you attach it to some sequence of changed phenomenon.

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

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

00:45:59.500 --> 00:46:05.740
useful way for natural selection to have tied the labels of hue onto something that would

00:46:05.740 --> 00:46:08.720
seem very strange to us.

00:46:08.720 --> 00:46:11.670
We're coming to the end of our time.

00:46:11.670 --> 00:46:13.869
Did we just begin, like a second ago?

00:46:13.869 --> 00:46:18.130
Well, that's rather what I felt. If we want to have some time questions...

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.

00:46:23.130 --> 00:46:26.200
Okay, well, let's go quickly through those bones.

00:46:26.200 --> 00:46:30.170
Okay. And if you start formulating questions in your head...

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

00:46:42.890 --> 00:46:50.849
ALH84001, which had tantalizing evidence...by the way, that rock was from Mars, one of the

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

00:46:55.760 --> 00:47:06.680
of that rock for possible life, traceable not to earth but from Mars.

00:47:06.680 --> 00:47:13.680
The evidence was very circumstantial but interesting, nonetheless. There was chemistry there that

00:47:13.680 --> 00:47:18.880
could only happen in the presence of oxygen, and there was chemistry there occupying a

00:47:18.880 --> 00:47:24.609
similar spot that could happen only in the absence of oxygen. Well, you might say who

00:47:24.609 --> 00:47:30.810
cares? Well, life is just such a machine. When you breathe in oxygen, you oxygenate

00:47:30.810 --> 00:47:35.020
the hemoglobin, that oxygen gets used for your metabolism, and it goes back without

00:47:35.020 --> 00:47:41.310
the oxygen. In the same body, you have oxygenating and deoxygenating forces operating within

00:47:41.310 --> 00:47:44.339
you. So, life does it for free.

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

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.

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

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

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

00:48:10.390 --> 00:48:14.920
the size of the smallest worms on earth but interesting, nonetheless.

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

00:48:20.310 --> 00:48:27.430
the astrophysicist. They had a biologist. They had a philosopher. And a picture of the

00:48:27.430 --> 00:48:32.730
worm comes up. The biologist, who is piped in by screen said, “That can't possibly

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,

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

00:48:46.670 --> 00:48:48.700
to give me the reason why it can't be life.

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

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

00:48:57.970 --> 00:49:04.990
talking about a rock from Mars. Why are you using earth to constrain your capacity to

00:49:04.990 --> 00:49:07.530
think about what exists out there?”

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

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,

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

00:49:26.390 --> 00:49:27.510
on earth has common DNA.

00:49:27.510 --> 00:49:29.180
Yeah. Well, he was being closed-minded.

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

00:49:33.160 --> 00:49:33.730
of one?

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

00:49:37.390 --> 00:49:42.369
his experience of life on this planet to make that generalization. On the other hand, one

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

00:49:48.200 --> 00:49:52.230
certain things that wouldn't work for physical reasons.

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

00:49:56.440 --> 00:50:03.250
somebody making an argument that said you cannot have...for example, maybe there's a

00:50:03.250 --> 00:50:08.780
certain minimum size of eye that could form an image, for purely physical reasons. That

00:50:08.780 --> 00:50:10.349
would be a good reason why.

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.

00:50:14.650 --> 00:50:16.960
Well, he was just wrong.

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

00:50:23.619 --> 00:50:25.010
my chest here.

00:50:25.010 --> 00:50:29.240
Okay. Shall we bring up the lights, and see if there are...

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

00:50:33.280 --> 00:50:38.210
aisles behind those microphones. I guess we can pick left and right for what questions

00:50:38.210 --> 00:50:39.560
you might have.

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

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

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

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

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

00:51:10.770 --> 00:51:11.670
in wonder of?

00:51:11.670 --> 00:51:12.280
Right.

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

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

00:51:25.630 --> 00:51:31.690
children because children are born inquisitors of their natural world. They turn over rocks.

00:51:31.690 --> 00:51:35.650
They jump in puddles. They pour water down your back.

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

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,

00:51:47.510 --> 00:51:51.820
but nonetheless, explorations into the natural world. What happens is, over time, that gets

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

00:51:56.830 --> 00:52:03.070
the behavior or disarray, plus adults far outnumber children, so I think the real problem

00:52:03.070 --> 00:52:09.940
in the world is adults, especially since they control the world, not the kids.

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

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

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.

00:52:28.260 --> 00:52:34.119
The nonstick frying pan way, which is it's useful because you get spinoffs like nonstick

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

00:52:40.849 --> 00:52:45.760
the problems with people who attempt to convey science to lay people, whether it's children

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

00:52:49.990 --> 00:52:55.040
it ordinary and mundane and the sort of thing you might meet in your own kitchen.

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

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

00:53:07.420 --> 00:53:13.460
of more poetic point of view rather than from a more utilitarian point of view.

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

00:53:19.770 --> 00:53:29.170
have this here at Crampton Auditorium, at Howard University. I have a practical application

00:53:29.170 --> 00:53:36.869
question for technology and its impact on humans, specifically cell phones, cellular

00:53:36.869 --> 00:53:37.680
cell phones.

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

00:53:45.480 --> 00:53:51.330
come a long way since the first cell phones came out, but I get particularly apprehensive

00:53:51.330 --> 00:53:55.440
when I see young people putting cell phones to the heads of little infants and saying,

00:53:55.440 --> 00:54:01.730
“Talk to Daddy,” or something like that. That's my first question, the impact of the

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.

00:54:09.550 --> 00:54:15.830
Then, my second question is about the references for the origins of calculus in the Egyptian

00:54:15.830 --> 00:54:18.589
culture. Thank you.

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

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.

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.

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

00:54:38.760 --> 00:54:46.240
is the active measurement...it's a fascinating thing, measurement. Because you can never

00:54:46.240 --> 00:54:53.240
measure anything precisely, that is, with unlimited precision. You can only measure

00:54:53.240 --> 00:54:55.760
it with the uncertainties of your measuring device.

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

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

00:55:08.890 --> 00:55:16.589
a phenomenon that does not exist, the variations in your measurement will occasionally give

00:55:16.589 --> 00:55:20.750
you a positive signal, as well as a negative signal.

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

00:55:28.210 --> 00:55:37.240
cancer, a paper gets written about that result, and then, people get concerned that cell phones

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

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

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.

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

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

00:56:06.290 --> 00:56:12.710
repeatable signal is yet to emerge from the total experiments that are done on it. That

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

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.

00:56:23.119 --> 00:56:30.140
Otherwise, I can either say the jury's still out, or the experimental results are consistent

00:56:30.140 --> 00:56:32.200
with no effect at all.

00:56:32.200 --> 00:56:35.740
I have nothing to add to that.

00:56:35.740 --> 00:56:38.619
About the calculus in Egypt...

00:56:38.619 --> 00:56:40.640
Can we have this one now?

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

00:56:46.730 --> 00:56:52.930
the limitation of our communication. I read recently that the Large Hadron Collider had

00:56:52.930 --> 00:57:01.920
some crazy experiments, but there apparently are particles that are seemingly unconnected

00:57:01.920 --> 00:57:07.050
but they react to each other in symmetrical patterns of some kind. I'm very amateurish

00:57:07.050 --> 00:57:13.880
on this, but what do you think would be the possibility of instantaneous communication

00:57:13.880 --> 00:57:19.310
across vast distances using some kind of particle manipulation?

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...

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

00:57:33.400 --> 00:57:39.940
apply macroscopically, but they don't reveal themselves as exotically as what happens with

00:57:39.940 --> 00:57:45.160
single particles. A particle can pop into existence, go out of existence, what we call

00:57:45.160 --> 00:57:51.170
tunnel from one place to another, instantly, with no time delay between the two. It could

00:57:51.170 --> 00:57:56.420
exist in all places at once and then show up instantaneously here when you make the

00:57:56.420 --> 00:57:57.040
measurement.

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

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

00:58:06.810 --> 00:58:13.890
exploit the quantum world for faster-than-light communication is what you are suggesting here;

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

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.

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

00:58:31.839 --> 00:58:36.880
probability of existing...the particle had a probability of existing over here. And so,

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

00:58:43.359 --> 00:58:48.440
we know, no, you cannot have faster-than-light communication, which we would desperately

00:58:48.440 --> 00:58:51.950
need to get bigger than the bubble to talk to the rest of the galaxy.

00:58:51.950 --> 00:58:56.880
Again, I'll try to make my answers even shorter than that.

00:58:56.880 --> 00:59:01.619
Making the distinction between life in the universe, which I think is inevitable, and

00:59:01.619 --> 00:59:08.200
intelligent life in the universe, which I question or challenge at least the probability

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

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

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

00:59:25.119 --> 00:59:30.920
is there intelligent life in the universe. What do you think those odds are?

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

00:59:36.770 --> 00:59:44.960
universe is extraordinarily rare phenomena happen every day someplace in the universe.

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

00:59:51.210 --> 00:59:56.430
up the numbers...stars in the galaxies, galaxies in the universe...these are staggeringly huge

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

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

01:00:09.480 --> 01:00:11.140
who have ever lived.

01:00:11.140 --> 01:00:16.930
These are staggeringly large, stupendously large numbers, to use Richard's word, that

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,

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

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

01:00:32.579 --> 01:00:35.520
enough to have a conversation with them.

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

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,

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

01:00:51.369 --> 01:00:56.920
head with some rational thinking and actually get them to pay attention.

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,

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

01:01:07.550 --> 01:01:11.130
do. Unfortunately, there's a certain amount of evidence that there's a certain kind of

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

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.

01:01:28.119 --> 01:01:32.690
My favorite example of this is the geologist Kurt Wise, who is a young earth creationist,

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

01:01:38.170 --> 01:01:43.310
said, in these very words; I think I quote him approximately right, “If all the evidence

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,

01:01:51.660 --> 01:01:56.020
but I would still be a young earth creationist because that is what Holy Scripture tells

01:01:56.020 --> 01:01:57.770
me.”

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

01:02:02.230 --> 01:02:09.970
who actually comes out and says that is pretty much advertising himself as beyond reason.

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

01:02:16.440 --> 01:02:22.619
in advance that scripture is going to take precedence over evidence. And here's a man

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,

01:02:29.020 --> 01:02:34.490
and yet, he's announced in advance, so there are certain people who are unreachable; but

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

01:02:39.470 --> 01:02:46.020
been exposed to the evidence which is plentiful and wonderful.

01:02:46.020 --> 01:02:48.099
Next question here.

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

01:02:52.310 --> 01:02:57.640
few words, both of you, on the philosophy of science. I just read Stephen Hawking's

01:02:57.640 --> 01:03:04.380
book, The Grand Design. The first page, philosophy is dead; and here at Howard, our administration

01:03:04.380 --> 01:03:09.690
is proposing the abolition of our philosophy programs. Could you say a few words?

01:03:09.690 --> 01:03:17.119
I have a couple of words to say about that. Up until early 20th century, philosophers

01:03:17.119 --> 01:03:24.730
had material contributions to make to the physical sciences. Pretty much after quantum

01:03:24.730 --> 01:03:30.910
mechanics, remember the philosopher is the would-be scientist but without a laboratory,

01:03:30.910 --> 01:03:38.220
right? So, what happens is the 1920s come in. We learn about the expanding universe

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

01:03:43.210 --> 01:03:48.240
what you can deduce from your armchair that the whole community of philosophers that previously

01:03:48.240 --> 01:03:53.050
had added materially to the thinking of the physical scientist were rendered essentially

01:03:53.050 --> 01:03:54.980
obsolete at that point.

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

01:04:00.660 --> 01:04:09.740
philosophers, but call me later and correct me if you think I missed somebody here, but

01:04:09.740 --> 01:04:15.560
philosophy has basically parted ways from the frontier of the physical sciences, when

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.

01:04:19.490 --> 01:04:23.750
The work physicist didn't even exist in any important way back then.

01:04:23.750 --> 01:04:27.540
I'm disappointed because there's a lot of brain power there that might have otherwise

01:04:27.540 --> 01:04:34.250
contributed mightily, but today simply does not. The philosophy has other...not that there

01:04:34.250 --> 01:04:39.400
can't be other philosophical subjects. There's religious philosophy and ethical philosophy

01:04:39.400 --> 01:04:43.589
and political philosophy, plenty of stuff for the philosopher to do, but the frontier

01:04:43.589 --> 01:04:46.910
of the physical sciences does not appear to be among them.

01:04:46.910 --> 01:04:50.970
Even in biology, I think, is an interesting point that the idea of evolution by natural

01:04:50.970 --> 01:04:59.030
selection, which came independently to two traveling naturalists in the 19th century.

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

01:05:02.420 --> 01:05:06.520
an armchair anywhere back to the Greeks, and none of them did.

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

01:05:11.900 --> 01:05:16.609
to 19th century scientists, living 200 years after Newton did something that seemed a lot

01:05:16.609 --> 01:05:19.319
more difficult.

01:05:19.319 --> 01:05:28.560
Check Anaxagoras, first theory of evolution in pre-Socratic Greece.

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

01:05:35.260 --> 01:05:38.990
and Wallace. I mean, there were a couple of other scientists who thought of it.

01:05:38.990 --> 01:05:42.819
The philosophers that I really respect in the world today are philosophers of science,

01:05:42.819 --> 01:05:47.260
are ones who have actually taken the trouble to learn some science, and there are some.

01:05:47.260 --> 01:05:51.270
And they're very good, clear thinkers, and they do help other people to think clearly;

01:05:51.270 --> 01:05:56.480
but they're really the same as scientists. There are scientists who are also trained

01:05:56.480 --> 01:05:57.619
in philosophy.

01:05:57.619 --> 01:05:58.460
Sir.

01:05:58.460 --> 01:06:02.530
Thank you both for coming. There's a group of scientists in Europe that have developed

01:06:02.530 --> 01:06:06.700
a Large Hadron Collider, and they're trying to recreate the conditions of what has been

01:06:06.700 --> 01:06:11.700
known as the Big Bang, slamming antiprotons and protons to try and find a particle known

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

01:06:16.000 --> 01:06:16.900
matter mass.

01:06:16.900 --> 01:06:21.900
Could you guys talk about the conditions of the universe at that time? Will this prove

01:06:21.900 --> 01:06:23.890
anything? This experiment?

01:06:23.890 --> 01:06:28.730
The interesting thing about physics is that there is very little physics left to be discovered

01:06:28.730 --> 01:06:33.890
on a tabletop. The way physics works is, the way discoveries in physics, by and large,

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,

01:06:40.540 --> 01:06:46.690
energy especially, speed...once you've explored these extremes, you're at the hairy, bleeding

01:06:46.690 --> 01:06:49.750
edge between what is known and unknown in the universe.

01:06:49.750 --> 01:06:54.109
So, if you want to discover something you've never done before, build an accelerator that

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

01:06:59.160 --> 01:07:06.079
particle accelerator we know, so now we have the very large tabletop version of the early

01:07:06.079 --> 01:07:11.520
universe, large and expensive, and it allows us to test our ideas about what was going

01:07:11.520 --> 01:07:17.510
on. And so, yes. It's regime of the early universe that we have theoretical understanding

01:07:17.510 --> 01:07:21.920
of but we have yet to have experimental verification for it.

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

01:07:27.390 --> 01:07:35.069
literally reduced to tears. I was moved so much by this stupendous effort of human ingenuity,

01:07:35.069 --> 01:07:46.010
human cooperation, multinational; and I attempted to express my poetic fascination and interest

01:07:46.010 --> 01:07:54.089
in this terrific enterprise in my latest book. There was an unfortunate misprint. It came

01:07:54.089 --> 01:07:56.369
out as the large Hardon collider.

01:07:56.369 --> 01:08:04.020
Just the D and the R, right?

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

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

01:08:19.029 --> 01:08:20.980
was more than her job was worth.

01:08:20.980 --> 01:08:30.949
Just a quick social comment. The 1990's cancelled superconducting supercollider that was to

01:08:30.949 --> 01:08:36.519
be built in Texas had peak energies three times as large as the Large Hadron Collider

01:08:36.519 --> 01:08:42.259
in Switzerland. Congress voted to not continue its funding. The project was scrapped, and

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

01:08:46.569 --> 01:08:47.650
Europe.

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

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

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

01:09:05.630 --> 01:09:06.079
realm.

01:09:06.079 --> 01:09:06.539
Sure.

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

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

01:09:18.959 --> 01:09:25.229
about this. Life that's been discovered at the point of sea floor spreading on earth

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

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,

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

01:09:47.389 --> 01:09:51.809
in the ocean itself between that point and the surface.

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?

01:09:57.429 --> 01:10:01.300
I'm sorry. Five or six miles.

01:10:01.300 --> 01:10:03.239
Yes, thank you.

01:10:03.239 --> 01:10:04.070
Exclude the thousand.

01:10:04.070 --> 01:10:07.760
Okay. I can give an astrophysicist's view, but I'd welcome the biologist.

01:10:07.760 --> 01:10:11.119
I didn't actually hear the question, so you start off by...

01:10:11.119 --> 01:10:16.369
Sure. So, these extremophiles...these are creatures that thrive under conditions that

01:10:16.369 --> 01:10:21.010
would kill the rest of us instantly, under high pressure, high temperature. In fact,

01:10:21.010 --> 01:10:25.800
at the ocean vents, they're thriving at 300 degrees Fahrenheit. The pressure of the water

01:10:25.800 --> 01:10:30.099
is high enough to prevent boiling, but the temperature is high enough that it would cook

01:10:30.099 --> 01:10:31.489
anything else.

01:10:31.489 --> 01:10:39.539
One of the great advances in exobiology was the discovery that life on earth is hardier

01:10:39.539 --> 01:10:45.030
than anyone had ever previously given it credit. We no longer need the room-temperature pond

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

01:10:49.820 --> 01:10:55.670
life doing the backstroke under extraordinarily hostile conditions, hostile to humans that

01:10:55.670 --> 01:10:56.499
is.

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

01:11:02.969 --> 01:11:08.559
net than we had previously thought we had available to us. Whereas before we would look

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

01:11:13.519 --> 01:11:18.320
evaporate; not too far away, water freezes. You're looking for that liquid water zone

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

01:11:23.090 --> 01:11:24.369
have to be the sun.

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

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

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

01:11:42.010 --> 01:11:42.409
cosmos.

01:11:42.409 --> 01:11:48.150
Among the many theories of the origin of life, recently people have started thinking about

01:11:48.150 --> 01:11:52.860
life might possibly have started under what we now think of as extreme conditions of high

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

01:11:57.639 --> 01:11:59.530
was when it first started, and that's an interesting possibility.

01:11:59.530 --> 01:12:01.840
So, they would look at us like we're the extremophiles.

01:12:01.840 --> 01:12:06.380
Exactly. They look at us as though we're the extremophiles.

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

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

01:12:14.159 --> 01:12:15.599
we go onto the book signing.

01:12:15.599 --> 01:12:21.380
Thank you, Howard, for making this free. Anyway, I read a book Consolation of Philosophy. The

01:12:21.380 --> 01:12:26.090
main guy, Boethius, is condemned to death. He has everything taken from him. All he has

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

01:12:34.090 --> 01:12:43.820
this execution by reasoning that the world has order, that there is something that keeps

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

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

01:12:56.630 --> 01:13:00.719
do?

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

01:13:10.179 --> 01:13:10.979
be executed...

01:13:10.979 --> 01:13:14.150
How about you are about to be executed?

01:13:14.150 --> 01:13:16.599
Oh, I'm about to be executed.

01:13:16.599 --> 01:13:23.139
You have nothing except your knowledge, your knowledge of science, your experience.

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

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

01:13:40.579 --> 01:13:45.579
dined upon flora and fauna throughout my life.

01:13:45.579 --> 01:13:57.639
What about you, Professor Dawkins?

01:13:57.639 --> 01:15:52.519
END OF AUDIO FILE STAGE 2 PRODUCTIONS

01:15:52.519 --> 01:16:37.380
DAWKINS TYSON

01:16:37.380 --> 99:59:59.999
1