this morning we have dr. Hugh Ross with us dr. Hugh Ross let me let me introduce dr. Hugh Ross for us dr. Ross astronomer and best-selling author Hugh Ross travels the globe speaking on advancing scientific discoveries including those pertain to cosmology in the study of the origins of matter and life intrigued by astronomy from childhood Ross become the became the youngest-ever director of observations for Vancouver's royal estranja astronomical society at age 16 he completed his BS in physics at the University of British Columbia an MS and PhD in astronomy at the University of Toronto for postdoctoral studies the National Research Council of Canada sent him to the California Institute Institute of Technology where he researched galaxies and quasars Ross is a popular speaker and has lectured at hundreds of university campuses conferences and churches around the world interacting with people of all backgrounds in 2012 Ross together dr. Gerald Schrader received the idea I eyed pea Trotter Prize presented by Texas A&M University and recognition of his work demonstrating connections between science and religion after Big Bang cosmology convinced him of a creators existence Ross's curiosity led him to examine the sacred texts of world religions for scientific and historical accuracy being convinced of the Bible's unique compatibility with scientific and historic data he recognized how a scholarly scientific background and faith conviction served as a provocative stimulus to dialogue with others in academic and civic environments dr. Ross lives in Southern California with his wife Cathy and they have two sons let's give a warm welcome to dr. Hugh Ross thank you Paul thank you and I was raised in British Columbia I'd get back there every summer to do some hiking and climbing this is where we were just a summer ago and I'm the founder and president of reasons to believe and we do believe in social media I answer questions that I get on both my Facebook and Twitter page so if you don't get to ask your question today you can do that through social media and we maintain a 24/7 YouTube channel so you can watch our lectures our courses by going to the reasons to believe the YouTube channel you can also contact me by texting my name two three one nine nine six that's your portal to get two free videos book chapters and much more and we are giving away a free chapter of my best-selling book the Creator in the cosmos you go into reasons org slash Ross and we're giving away the chapter that pertains of the cosmology of Stephen Hawking and of Roger Penrose and I'm speaking on improbable planet that today and we're giving away a free chapter of that book as well again you can get that at reasons dot org slash Ross but what I'm going to talk about is what it needs to happen in order to make our universe habitable our galaxy cluster habitable our galaxy habitable and our planet habitable and not just habitable for life but habitable for human beings or the equivalent of human beings and not just habitable for a few hundred of us but habitable for billions of us what does it take and in my book improbable planet I described several hundred different features of our galaxy and our planet that must be fine-tuned in order for billions of us humans to live in this planet at one time now as an astronomer I can tell you there tens of thousands of clusters of galaxies in our universe and life is only possible in a cluster of galaxies but most galaxies do exist in a cluster of galaxies and your typical cluster of galaxies has anywhere from a thousand to ten thousand member galaxies and they tend to be rather densely clustered and where the cluster is dominated by supergiant galaxies and just this past Wednesday astronomers image for the first time the event horizon of a black hole and they chose on purpose a supergiant galaxy at the center of the Virgo cluster of galaxies m87 because it's black hole comes in at seven billion times the mass of our star of the Sun and if we didn't get to see that image I've got to post it on my Facebook page and my Twitter page first ever image of the event horizon of a black hole but this is what our cluster of galaxies looks like it's not at all like a typical cluster it doesn't have thousands of galaxies it's only got about a hundred galaxies in it it has no giant galaxies it's the only galaxy cluster I'm aware of that doesn't have a giant galaxy in it instead it's got two large galaxies our Milky Way galaxy down at the lower right and the Andromeda galaxy at the upper left all the rest the galaxies are dwarf galaxies and notice they're far apart a typical cluster of galaxies the galaxies are about this far apart ours are much farther apart and because they're farther apart you don't have the structure of the Andromeda galaxy or a Milky Way galaxy heavily distorted as is typical in other clusters of galaxies on the other hand the spiral structure of our Milky Way galaxy cannot be sustained unless our Milky Way galaxy is consuming dwarf galaxies on a regular basis our Milky Way galaxy has a diet these tiny galaxies that it sucks into its core and the gas of those small galaxies that it's consuming sustains the spiral structure and life is only possible in a spiral galaxy only in a spiral galaxies are stars far enough apart from one another where we can actually have life being sustained on a planet that's orbiting it but the other unique feature of our Milky Way galaxy is that it's got two of the five largest galaxies in fact the largest dwarf galaxies in our local group of galaxies are the small and large Magellanic Clouds that our image up at the top of this picture and they're positioned in such a way that they act as a gravitational funnel to draw in smaller dwarf galaxies into the center of our Milky Way galaxy and explains why our Milky Way galaxy has had such beautifully symmetrical spiral arms for the past ten billion years and that little yellow dot there shows you the position of our solar system and right now we're halfway between two spiral arms that's a good place to be the article got published just yesterday in the Astrophysical Journal and making the point that when we cross a spiral arm that's deadly for advanced life it's okay if you're a microbe but not good if you're an advanced animal and but fortunately we only cross a spiral arm about once every billion years and right now we're precisely halfway between the Sagittarius and spy and Perseus spiral arms but this symmetrical spiral arm structure where the spiral arms are far apart from one another is unique feature of a Milky Way galaxy now we astronomers have been looking for galaxies far far away that might be candidates for life to exist I mean you've probably seen one or more of those Star Wars movies and they always open up with a galaxy far far away well we've looked at galaxies far far away in the search for a galaxy that's sufficiently like ours that it could be a candidate for advanced life and bottom line is they need to change the script there are no galaxies far far away that have the characteristics that would make possible advanced life if you want to Vance light it's got to be inside our spiral galaxy and to show you this the next 10 slides are the galaxies with that we've found that are the most similar to a milky way galaxy but each one of them has characteristics that would rule out the possibility have advanced life this is the nearest large spiral galaxies to ours the Andromeda galaxy but you can see that the spiral arms have been warped and distorted and that's because there was a recent encounter with a large dwarf galaxy that passed through virtually the center of the Andromeda galaxy the spiral arms are closer together and warped and you see there's a lot of feathers and the Spurs between the spiral arms and you do have to be living in a spiral galaxy that's got a bar but here the bar is way too large and the large size of the bar has distorted the spiral arm structure here's another barred galaxy and again you can see that in between the spiral arms you just have dozens and dozens of these Spurs and feathers this is the pinwheel galaxy often referred to by astronomers as the closest twin to our Milky Way galaxy but here again you can see the spiral arm structure is distorted with lots of feathers and Spurs in between there rudy is no safe place for advanced life in this galaxy here's another example NGC 908 and the other spiral arms have been severely distorted m83 and this one shows you how there's just stars in between the spiral arm structure and here's a couple of more galaxies or all the galaxies that are most similar to ours but this is what our galaxy looks like incidentally this is not a photograph there's no way we can send a spaceship above our Milky Way galaxy look back but this is a map that's been developed by radio astronomers x-ray astronomers infrared astronomers optical astronomers we've been able to piece together different sections and this is really quite an accurate picture of what our Milky Way galaxy looks like now we are aware because of the composition of our solar system that our solar system must have had his birthplace in a giant molecular cloud that led to the formation of a beast 10,000 stars so we were born in a dense star cluster and say how do you know that only if we were born in such a dense star cluster would we have been blasted by aluminum 26 so aluminum 26 is a short-lived radiometric isotope and because we were born near to these supergiant stars that produce huge amounts of this aluminum-26 gas being blasted off that got rid of most of our water in atmosphere and why is that important a typical rocky planet the size of the earth will have 2400 times as much nitrogen as our planet does 1200 times as much carbon a thousand times as much water which means you're gonna have a planet with oceans that are thousands of miles deep and on such a planet you're not going to have surface continents you're only gonna have water or you're gonna have an atmosphere so thick that is going to be impossible for lungs to function for lungs to be able to function you want an air pressure that's no more than three times that we have here on our planet or three times less we actually have the optimal atmospheric pressure and the atmospheric position but that's only possible were born in a star cluster where all the volatiles the gases in the water get blasted away by this intense radiation the other thing we notice about our planet Earth we are the uranium thorium champion of the universe compared to other earth-like rocky planets we have 630 times as much thorium and 340 times as much Iranian now you say that doesn't sound nice those are deadly isotope wise radiometric isotopes they're long-lived radiometric isotopes and because our planet is so super endowed with uranium and thorium we have this powerful Dynamo in the core of our earth which generates a strong long-lasting magnetic field and that's what protects life from deadly cosmic radiation it also prevents our atmosphere from being sputtered away by the radiation from the Sun and that uranium thorium is also responsible for generating the continents without that uranium the thorium our planet would have remained a water world and so as the molecular cloud begins to condense and form stars this is some a little bit like what the cluster we were born in but we didn't stay there what happened was early in the history of our star we got gravitationally bounced by nearby big stars which basically kicked us out of the star cluster and so we now recognizes our birth spot was the place where the abundance of heavy elements was the highest and we got sent out to one of the places where it is the lowest and so that first dotted line that you see there represents the place where we were born so we were born at this location relative the center of our galaxy we got kicked out by a gravitational spark from nearby giant stars and we wound up stopping in this location here now this is the most dangerous place in our galaxy for advanced life this is the safest place so we were born in the most dangerous place it was important though because only we were born there where we've actually gotten the heavy elements that we need to make advanced life possible but it's critical we not stay there advanced life would not be able to survive there but we wound up being situated in a place where the star density is low and it's also the location that is known as the co rotation distance from the center of our galaxy now the spiral structure you see there basically has a rigid rotating system it's kind of creative by density waves I won't go into the technical details and stars revolve around the center of the galaxy according to Newtonian mechanics which means stars near the center will go around the center of the galaxy rapidly and those far away much more slowly this red line here is the co rotation distance that's the distance from the center of the galaxy where a star will revolve around the center of the galaxy at the same rate that the spiral structure rotates which means that's the place we're gonna cross spiral arms Lise frequently now if you're exactly at the correlation distance you're gonna experience mean motion resonances which will strongly bounce you in or out where we are is that just inside the co rotation distance we don't experience these destructive resonances but it means that we cross spiral arms least frequently of any star in the planetary system we cross about once every billion years and the last time we crossed was about 500 million years ago which explains why right now were halfway between spiral arms so this indicates the place where we were born and this indicates the place right now between these two spiral arms now that's referred to as the Galactic habitable zone the distance from the center of our galaxy where life as possible life's not possible here it's not possible there it's only possible just inside those co-wrote Asian distance but when it comes to habitability when you read the astronomical literature most of the focus is not on the Galactic habitable zone in fact I just wrote an article a week ago every week I put on an article called today's new reason to believe as folks on a website where I talked about the super Galactic habitable zone and again there's black hole that was imaged and published just this past Wednesday that's at the center of the Virgo cluster of galaxies if we were in the Virgo cluster then we would not be that radiation from the black hole would kill us our little cluster of galaxies orbits at the extreme outer fringe of the Virgo supercluster of galaxies were far enough away where the radiation from that black hole is not strong enough to kill us and so there's a super Galactic habitable zone there's a Galactic habitable zone but mostly attention in the scientific literature has been focused on the circumstellar habitable zone the distance from a star where life might be conceivable and we see here's what's referred to as the liquid water habitable zone the distance from a star where the temperature will be between zero and 100 degrees centigrade where liquid water could exist in the liquid form but again as you look at the literature we now realize all the attention has been given to the liquid water habitable zone but there's actually 10 other habitable zones so in addition to the liquid water habitable zone you got the ultraviolet habitable zone the photosynthetic habitable zone the tropospheric ozone habitable zone and I'll go through each of these in detail one of them was discovered literally just a week ago and I haven't had a chance to update my slides so you're only gonna get 10 of the 11 but again you can see today's new reason to believe where I wrote about the 11th that was just discovered days ago but again mostly attention has been focused on the liquid water habitable zone but there are different liquid water habitable zones the ephemeral water zone this is referred to as a possibility of a planet having liquid water on say a square kilometer of its surface for maybe a couple of months and we now realize that's not going to be appropriate for life if all you got is liquid water for a short period of time on a small region of the planet then that's gonna be of no benefit for life but this is often the habitable zone that you see refer to in the scientific literature then there's what's called a semi-permanent liquid water habitable zone and this is what we're talking about water existing not just for a few weeks for a few months but literally existing for a few centuries and not just on one square kilometer of the planet surface but in addition to more than a thousand square kilometres and what you notice is in that case that zone is narrower incidentally that heyyou refers to the distance that our planet Earth is from our star but if you really want to have water that lasts long enough and covers enough of the surface of the planet where life actually can survive then we're dealing with what's called the permanent water habitable zone and you can see here it's much much narrower than what we see typically referred to in the scientific literature so often what you see in the literature is you have this ephemeral liquid water have a little zone where virtually every planet would be class as being potentially habitable in fact if you go to the NASA website they refer to the fact that there could be 40 billion habitable planets in our Milky Way galaxy but they're referring to this habitable zone where we got this very broad but again if all you got is liquid water in a square kilometer for a few weeks that's really not a habitable planet if you really want to have a possibility of life you need the water to hang around for a while and it needs to cover a significant fraction of the planet's surface and so in terms of a permanent liquid water habitable zone this is what it looks like and incidentally this has been exaggerated so that you can see it in this audience the next slide actually shows you what this permanent liquid water habitable zone really does look like you can barely see and our planet Earth does exist in that permanent liquid water habitable zone now the other habitable zone that's gotten the most attention the scientific literature has what's referred to as the ultraviolet habitable zone and the recognition is if you've got too much ultraviolet radiation coming into the surface of your planet that will kill life but you need at least a little bit to come in because you need some ultraviolet radiation particularly the longer wavelength radiation to synthesize critical bio chemicals so without ultraviolet radiation life is impossible but too much ultraviolet radiation makes life impossible but what astronomers have been able to determine is that of a star is less massive than the Sun then the ultraviolet habitable zone does not overlap the liquid water habitable zone for light to actually exist both zones must overlap one another hamper stars more massive than the Sun we discovered that the ultraviolet habitable zone is outside the liquid water habitable zone as opposed what we see with stars that are less massive now just simply recognizing that for a star our planet to be truly habitable we must have both the liquid water and ultraviolet habitable zones overlapping that eliminates all stars that are younger than the Sun and eliminates all stars that are less massive of the Sun or more massive than Sun suddenly that 40 billion drops down to just a few million but what we recognize is that if life is not photosynthetic it doesn't do much the metabolic rates for photosynthetic life are a thousand to ten million times higher than for non photosynthetic life and if you want any kind of advanced life you have to begin with photosynthetic life in fact the amazing thing is the origin of life on planet Earth was not just the simplest microbes it included the more complex microbes including two different kinds of photosynthetic microbes but it's only the photosynthetic life forms that actually have a metabolic rate high enough where you can actually have a diversity of life that's adaptable enough that life can actually survive for a significant period of time and we discover here is that the ultraviolet habitable zone is much narrower than what I showed you in the previous slides and it requires much higher stability in an ultraviolet habitable zone now I've given you three habitable zones of all the planets we discovered it's almost 4000 planets we've discovered outside of our solar system of those four thousand planets how many reside in the liquid water habitable zone the ultraviolet habitable zone and the photosynthetic habitable zone the answer is zero we've yet to find one that resides in those three zones but you also have to reside in what's called the tropospheric ozone habitable zone where we have to be the appropriate distance from the star the host star where you got enough ozone to make sure he don't get the buildup of biochemical smog for example trees followed a lot of smog grasses poured a lot of smog but as tropospheric ozone that prevents that smog from building up to a level where as deadly to all life but too much ozone means you're not going to be live animal life and even certain kinds of plants would experience problem respiring if the ozone level is too high and then we have what's called the planet rotation rate that actually changes these different zones because it affects the cloud reflectivity and the faster rotates the warmer the planet is and that could push it in or outside of the habitable zone likewise the tilt of a planet's rotation axis the higher they liquidy the warmer the planet and that could change the habitable zones another zone that Scott and a lot of attentions was called the tidal habitable zone and the whole point here is if you're too close to your star you get tidal locking if you want an example of tidal locking think of our Moon our moon is sufficiently close to the earth that the gravitational pull of the earth on the near side of the moon is quite a bit stronger than it is in the far side of the Moon and this forces the moon to maintain one face throughout its entire revolution basically tidal locking is define where you got enough tidal forces that it means that the rotation rate of the planet becomes identical to its revolutionary rate now for example both Venus and Mercury are sufficiently close to our start of the Sun that they've experienced tidal locking where they have rotation periods that are quite similar to the Revolutionary period consequently it's blazingly hot for weeks on end on the side that faces the Sun and extremely cold on the opposite side and so and then the strong tidal forces basically forces the rotation axis till to go to zero which means you're not going to have seasons and in order for you to avoid time by the way if you wait long enough our planet Earth will be tidally locked to the Sun fortunately that won't happen for another forty billion years on the other hand because the tidal interaction goes up with a fourth power of the distance between the star and its planet just push our planet earth 1% closer than it is to our star then we would experience tidal interactions that would rule out the possibility of an advanced life which is the basis for the final statement the star mass must equal the sun's mass to within 1% precision in order to avoid a problem with tidal locking and then there is the astral sphere a habitable zone this is referring to the atmosphere of the star our star the Sun has an atmosphere and it actually blows out a wind the solar wind and that solar wind is a good thing for us in that that solar wind pushes away the deadly cosmic radiation but if you get too strong of a stellar wind the stellar wind proves deadly for life but if it's not strong enough the cosmic radiation is deadly for life we happen to be orbiting our star where the radiation from the Sun the wind balances out the radiation we get from the rest of the universe and actually creates a safe spot for us to build exist on the other hand none of that would work unless we had a strong minute a field that shields us from both the solar radiation and the cosmic radiation and then we had the atmospheric electric field and what we discovered is that planets with an atmosphere the closer they are to the host star the stronger the electric field they have in their atmosphere and so for example just last year we measured the electric field in the atmosphere of Venus Earth and Mars and we discovered is because Venus is a little bit closer to our start of the Sun it has an atmospheric electric field of about 10 volts for the Earth and Mars it's less than two volts now and it gets up as high as 10 volts it basically desiccates the planet and so it explains why even though Venus has got such a thick atmosphere and potentially could have water on it because of its electric field it has become bone-dry and then the one that was discovered a year ago is what's called the Milankovitch cycles and this is referring to the fact that the temperature for example planet Earth varies over time scales of about a hundred thousand years and that variation is because of the change in the tilt of our rotation axis and you say what causes that rotation axis to tilt back and forth it's basically the tidal interaction of the moon and the Sun but the tilt isn't very much it's only about two degrees so we go from say 22 degrees to 24 degrees over a timescale of 41,000 years now this is not true are the other planets the other planets their rotation axes tilt goes back and forth by 60 to 90 degrees and if that were to happen there'd be no possibility for animal life on the planet the seasonal changes would just be too drastic what prevents our rotation axes tilt from varying by not more than two degrees is our Moon we have a gigantic moon orbiting a small planet as because of that single gigantic moon orbiting our relatively small planet that a rotation axis is stable and this is where the moon is unique if you look at the mass of our Moon compared to the mass of its host planet it's 50 times bigger than any other known moon and so we're literally living on the only planet moon system where the rotation axis tilt is only plus some as two degrees nevertheless that variation of two degrees is one of the big factors explaining why we have an ice age cycle why we live on a planet where the coverage of ice varies from 10 percent to about 23 percent over time scale of 40 to a hundred thousand years the other thing that changes the temperature of the surface of the planet is a very tiny variation in the shape of our orbit the eccentricity of our orbit and so when the orbit of planet Earth becomes more elliptical we get warmer when it's less elliptical we become colder and that's the secondary effect driving our ice age cycle so for example this is currently what the ice age cycle looks like where you got about a ninety thousand year period where you got twenty to twenty three percent of the planet covered with ice and then that's you have what's called an interglacial or drops down to about ten percent and right now we're in an interglacial and for the last 800,000 years it's been ninety thousand years of lots of ice with ten thousand years of a smaller amount of ice now what we've seen went on extrasolar planets is that typically you will get a very large malankov it's cycle so for example this is the rotation axes tilt variation of Mars where it tilts back and forth by 60 degrees explains why for example in spite of Mars being bombarded with water-rich comets comets are about 85% frozen water and Mars collects sees on a daily basis so does earth for that matter but we notice on Mars the ice caps are relatively small the reason why they're small is because of the change in the rotation axis tilt that when the rotation axis changes over that exposes the ice cap to warmer radiation from the Sun which causes the ice cap to disappear and takes new comments to form another one and likewise we notice that in most planetary systems you get a rather big change in the shape of the orbit the bottom line is one of two things happens to the planets that are the most earth-like as they wind up either becoming completely bone dry or totally covered with ice and so this is another fine-tune feature we see on our planet Earth is that we do get an ice age cycle but we get a subtle ice age cycle rather than an ice age cycle that causes us to become completely bone dry or totally covered with ice now for the rest of the talk I'm gonna focus on what we need here on planet earth in order for billions of as humans to exist here at one time now you don't need an ice age cycle if all you want is a few hundred humans wandering around in a small region but if you want billions of us here it's crucial we'd be living during an Ice Age cycle and I'll explain why it's also important we'd be living at a time when our Sun is middle-aged it has to be almost exactly middle age for us to be able to be here and number three we have to be living in an Ice Age cycle or we're in an episode of extreme climate stability you've probably heard a lot about global warming and climate change but you may not have heard of is that the past ninety five hundred years have been the most extreme period of climate stability our planet has ever observed and so the stability we've been enjoying for the past ninety five hundred years is not the norm it's the exception it's the extreme exception the norm is climate instability now if we look at what we see here in our North America North America of all Acamas experiences the most extreme effects of the ice age cycle for the whole planet the ice varies from about 10% coverage to about 22 23 % coverage and that is true of North America when you're at the minimum 10 percent of our continent is covered with ice but notice most of it is on Greenland okay at the height of the last ice age this was 26,000 years ago 55 percent of our planet was covered with ice and fact all the way down here to Southern California we had thousands of feet of ice covering it that's where Yosemite Valley was formed it was formed by the retreating of ice left over from the last ice age and this is what it looks like right now and this is what the ice age cycle looks like but what you'll see in my book improbable planet are a dozen reasons why to have billions of humans living on the planet at one time in order to have any kind of civilization beyond a Stone Age technology it's critical that we be living during an Ice Age cycle and I'm gonna give you just a few the reasons why number one is we need melting water water liquid water melting from glaciers left over from the last ice age in order to water the great agricultural Plains and me if you look at a globe in fact let me just show you this one this kind of shows you the northern hemisphere and what it looked like during the last ice age and the turquoise color you see there the blue color basically shows those regions of the northern hemisphere that were covered with a minimum thickness of one thousand feet of ice and then that ice began to melt and it's the melting of that ice that feeds the great rivers the water the great agricultural Plains and what you see here is a Tibetan ice field it's now only covering about a million square miles but it's the melting of ice left over from the last ice age that feeds all the great rivers of China India and so East Asia and so we're able to feed three billion people in Southeast Asia thanks to ice that's been left over from the last ice age and when all that ice melts away we're no longer gonna build a sustained billions of people in the face of the earth the same thing is true of North America we still have ice left or from the last ice age that covers the Cordillera and mountains the Rocky Mountains and several other mountain rages in the west of the US and that feeds a Missouri the Mississippi it feeds the Fraser the Columbia the North and South Saskatchewan rivers and as these rivers fed by the melting of ice slit or from the last ice age that explains why we here in North America it can grow as much food as we grow and why we can export it to all the nations of the world and likewise you can look at Europe it's ice and the elves it's ice and the caucuses that's feeding the rivers that allow Europe and Western Asia to grow all the food that they're able to grow incidentally the same things true the southern hemisphere ice left over from the last ice age in Patagonia is basically explains why you can grow as much food as we grow in South America and this is even true the Amazon there's still ice left over from the last ice age and the high mountains in the Andes that's feeding the Amazon and other rivers that made possible the other thing we notice is that the ice age cycle produces fertilization events that when ice begins to recede off the high plateaus that were covered with thousands of feet of ice the recession of that ice and the ice recedes very quickly literally in a thousand years you have thousands of feet of ice dropping down to just a few inches or a few feet and it's that rapid deglaciation that sets a powerful winds of blow dust off the high plateaus and dump set dusts on the low agricultural Plains and that dust is nutrient-rich so with each Ice Age cycle we get a fertilization event and so for example the reason why we were able to grow so much food in India and China is because they've gotten a huge load of nutrient-rich dusts coming off the high plateaus of a Central Asia and that's also happened in Europe and a North American the other thing that happens is that when you got all that ice forced down on the continental land masses and it melts you get a rebound effect and that rebound a gravitational rebound ignites volcanoes all over the world so for example a paper was published just six months ago making a point that were the receding of ice left over from the last ice age roughly 15,000 years ago where he got this rapid recession of ice it ignited volcanoes all over the world and when volcanoes ignite they dump nutrient-rich dust and ash all over the world and so by two separate means we get the fertilization of these great agricultural Plains and again without that we wouldn't be able to produce the food quantity that we produce but you know I like mountaineering and hiking that's my hobby and I go to places just to see these beautiful canyons and waterfalls and mountains and Sirk's that was all carved during the last ice age if you actually look at the past for knapp billion year history the earth the last ice age and the ice age cycle was the most severe ice age in the ice age cycle it was also the one that had the most rapid movement back and forth of ice it wasn't just the build-up of ice and recession of ice there was actually several build ups of ice recession build-up a very rapid movement of that ice and what that is created is the most spectacular scenery our planet Earth has ever had we are living in the most beautiful time in the history of our planet Earth we're living at the most scenic moment so for example a couple of summers ago I took my family and several friends into this particular Canyon it's in British Columbia where the walls are 2,000 vertical granite feet there's glaciers all around and when I was in the middle of this Canyon I could count 25 large waterfalls flowing off the canyon walls into the canyon floor and with all that water flowing in the canyon floor was filled with wild strawberries raspberries blueberries and loaded with a wonderful life forms that we could commune with this is unique to our time at no other time in the history of birth that we had that and I think the creator knew in advance there would come a time when most of us would live in cities and most of us would spend our workday behind a computer screen and in order to maintain our sanity we'd need to be able to get to places like this once in a while that's so I keep my sanity I make sure I get to one of these places every once in a while and hey California is a place where we've had some beautiful canyons and scenery carved thanks to the last ice age okay but if we read the book I give you another eight reasons why we had to be living in an Ice Age cycle in order to be able to have I mean one example I'll give you is we live at a time thanks to the ice age cycle we're in where we got abundant hydropower capability you know with the receding of the ice there's all these lakes rivers canyons and cirques that are created had no other time in the history of our planet Earth have we had the water power resources that we have today I grew up in Canada Canada is a place where they get all of their electricity from water power all of Canada was covered with ice in the last ice age that they produced so much water power they export it to the US okay the second reason I mentioned though was we have to be at a time when the Sun is perfectly middle-aged and stars are a lot like human beings they're unstable when they're young they're unstable when they're old they're maximally stable when their middle age now in the case of human beings the stability period is more than half of your lifetime in the case of stars that's not the case the stability time is extremely brief relative to their entire burning period now of all stars our star the Sun has the least flaring activity but it still flares a lot and when it's young its flaring and when it's old its flaring now this vertical scale here is logarithmic and so when the Sun was young the frequency and intensity of its flares was a million times greater than it is today and explains why for example for the first three billion years of the history of life on planet Earth all you've got her microbes because the flaring activity was so intense from the Sun it would only permit the existence of microbial life so we want to know why such a long period goes by before you see plants and animals while the Sun is one reason it simply doesn't permit anything more advanced than microbial life to exist as we go into the future the flaring activity will pick up again but what I want you to notice this is where we are right now we are living at the time when the solar flaring activity is minimal so we were here any earlier or any later the flaring activity would be too great matter of fact there was a solar flare in 1859 and if we were to get a flare like that today it would knock out our GPS satellites it would knock out your phone communication and the words of my two sons it would be the end of civilization as we know it okay and we haven't had a flare like that since 150 years ago a flaring minimum occurs when the Sun is four point five seven billion years old that's how old the Sun is right now however what we've been able to determine by looking at both the photons coming out of the core of the Sun and the neutrinos coming out of the core of the Sun is that the Sun entered an extremely stable luminosity phase beginning a little less than 50,000 years ago and those same measurements tell us we'll exit that phase a little less than fifty thousand years into the future in other words there's a time window briefer than a hundred thousand years where you get the necessary luminosity stability from the Sun to make possible this period of climate stability were enjoying right now we're right in the middle of that narrow window so the Sun can burn hydrogen for nine billion years but only for about 90 thousand years do you get the kind of luminosity stability that makes possible the existence of human civilization and of course you have to be in an interglacial which makes the period about 10,000 years wide now this poses a major problem however the Sun as it continues to fuse hydrogen into helium gets brighter and brighter as it continues so this is what the luminosity of the Sun looks like over the history of life now the luminosity goes up when the Sun is young because it's accumulating mass the luminosity of a star goes up for the fourth power of its mass it stops accumulating mass and then it loses about six percent of its mass and that explains this luminosity drop you see here but then it stops losing mass and an ignites nuclear fusion and the nuclear core of the Sun and this stuff starts the process of fusing hydrogen to helium our Sun is basically a gigantic hydrogen bomb and so that begins to cause the luminosity to increase it increases why because as hydrogen is fusing to helium that increases the density in the core of our Sun and that increasing density means that the Sun burns ever more efficiently and so it explains why the Sun has brightened by more than 20% over the history of life on planet Earth now throughout this period of the history of life on planet Earth for 90% of that history our planet has had no ice at all and today we have ice so that's the big paradox why do we have ice some planet Earth today when the Sun is brighter than it's ever been in the history of life there should be a time when we got no ice whatsoever and yet we've got ice and so how do we explain that well just recently geophysicist and astronomers have come up with an explanation for why in spite of the Sun being brighter than it's ever been in the history of life we have the cycle of ice between 10 and 23% and what they discovered is as a combination have astronomical events and geophysical events I'll give you the geophysical events first there have been five unprecedented plate tectonic events that explain how the planet got cold enough where we have ice so we began to get ice about three million years ago before that we had no ice at all in fact for the past half billion years there's been no ice but today we got ice ok one reason is what happened to Antarctica Antarctica was attached to Australia it broke off from Australia but remained attached to South America and beginning about 11 15 million years ago it broke off from South America and began to move rapidly towards the South Pole and so there's this rapid tectonic movement away from South America towards the South Pole and when it got over the South Pole at stop moving right when it got over at the South Pole and so here we are Antarctica the South Pole no longer isn't moving it's stable there but Antarctica ranks as the most isolated continent on planet Earth today what you notice is there's open ocean water all around Antarctica and because of that open ocean water you get powerful ocean currents and winds now if you're like me when I was in elementary school our teachers had us read these novels of the sailing ship era and those novels talk about the Roaring Forties and the roaring 50s and that's a reference to the powerful winds and currents that a rip around Antarctica ants because of those winds and currents literally moving at above 40 miles an hour that we wind up with Antarctica being cooled so it's not just the fact that it's right over the South Pole that alone would not explain why you get ice on Antarctica it took a combination of it being right over the South Pole plus these powerful currents and winds the cooled Antarctica enough where ice began to accumulate and so that's where ice began to appear on planet earth for the first time was over Antarctica but there's another cooling effect this current that was going around Antarctica once we get ice covering most of Antarctica that begins to cool the rest of the planet why because ice reflects sunlight with about 60 percent efficiency whereas ground and rock reflects it with about 10 to 15% efficiency and so with all that ice covering Antarctica that had a cooling effect on the planet and then what happened was this circulation began to push a current up through the Atlantic Ocean so cold water from Antarctica began to move up the Atlantic Ocean and began to cool all the comment I'll land masses that are adjacent to the Atlantic Ocean okay that's tectonic event number one tectonic event number two as what happened to Greenland Greenland if you go back 50 million years ago was situated just off of Newfoundland here moreover it was low elevation and so it had no ice but then it got a tectonic kick and began to move rapidly up towards Baffin Island and towards the North Pole and as it moved northward by 1,100 miles it moved over a hot plume now Hawaii is an example of a current hot plume where the Hawaiian Islands are sitting over region where he got those upwelling deep mantle material from the interior the earth come yet towards the surface breaking through the crust and forming the Hawaiian Islands Hawaii is the fastest growing state in the Union because of that hot plume effect while that also happened when Greenland moved over its current location it got situated over a hot plume and what that did is it pushed the landmass of Greenland from being less than 500 feet above sea level to where it's now seven to eight thousand feet above sea level and it's a combination of it being pushed towards the North Pole and as landmass going up by seven or eight thousand feet that caused ice to form over Greenland you need both its location plus the pushing up of his land elevation event number three is what happened to Pangaea planet Earth has a supercontinent cycle where the continents come together and make one continent break apart and come together and break apart it happens about every half billion years and Pangaea was a quarter of a billion years ago where we just had the one continent that broke apart but this is the first time in the super and cycle where most of the landmass went into the northern hemisphere and moved into the northern hemisphere in such a way that the Arctic Ocean got almost completely enclosed by land masses and land masses are always warmer than open ocean water and was the enclosure of the Arctic sea and so we see here as a greenland moved north and applaud the gap and so we have islands and land masses encompassing the Arctic Ocean and what that did is it caused a cap to form an ice cap to form now open ocean water reflects sunlight was six percent efficiency only ice reflects sunlight was sixty percent efficiency and so with the forming of this cap of ice over the Arctic Ocean entered a cooling effect on the whole planet and so first we get ice over Greenland then from ice over Antarctica than ice over Greenland then ice over the Arctic Ocean and with all that high reflectivity of sunlight it has a cooling effect on the entire planet event number four is what happened to North and South America North and South America if you go back ten million years were separated continents and what that allowed was for warm Pacific Ocean water to come into the Atlantic remember what I said before we got this movement of cold water from Antarctica going up through the Atlantic but the cooling effect was blunted by those warm equatorial water from the Pacific coming between North and South America but that got brought with the formation of the Isthmus of Panama that formed a land barrier that prevented warm Pacific Ocean water from going into the equatorial Atlantic and that dramatically increased the cooling effect of the cold water coming up from Antarctica and dramatically increased the cooling of effect of the landmasses adjoining the Atlantic he meant number five was the most important and the dramatic of them all and this is what happened to the indian sub-continent 70 million years ago the indian subcontinent was attached to the island of madagascar that broke off from madagascar and then rushed towards the indian to towards Asia and it moved at a rate of 22 centimeters per year that's an all-time world record for tectonic plate movement okay now a really rapid tectonic plate movement is 2 centimeters per year and so this is literally 11 times faster than what's considered to be a really rapid movement to give you a visual demonstration a typical rapid tectonic plate movements scaled down would be like me walking like this ok then we're gonna show you what 22 centimeters per year would look like it'd be like me running across the stage and so what happened is that when India and crashed into Asia it was a huge impact event and so we have starting 10 million years ago the Indian subcontinent rushing towards Asia at this high speed at 22 centimeters per year and it caused the ocean floor between Asia and the Indian subcontinent and those are the Himalayas the Himalayan mountains are pushed up sea floor it explains why when you climb Mount Everest you'll find seashells near the top of Mount Everest because Mount Everest is crumpled-up sea floor now because of how rapidly the Indian subcontinent smashed into Asia those Himalayan mountains have been pushed up to nerdi 30,000 feet elevation and again the higher the elevation the colder it gets and so what you have are the Himalayan mountains covered with all these glaciers and ice and what's interesting here is now you've got glaciers and ice not at 70 degrees north or south latitude you got it near the equator and when sunlight reflects off of ice near the equator it has four times the cooling effect of ice of sunlight that reflects off of high latitude parts of the world so of these five events the one that has the most dramatic effect is what's happened to India it's basically recreated an equatorial ice cap because as India collided into Asia it not only formed the Himalayas it pushed up to bet the Tibetan Plateau has been pushed up to an average elevation of 17,000 feet and so ice not only covers the Himalayas it covers a Tibetan Plateau an area that covers about a million square miles and incidentally if you were to ask me what's the second-fastest tectonic plate movement ever observed in the entire history of the earth it's the current movement of India into Asia the collision is not yet finished India is moving into Asia at a rate of five centimeters per year so it explains why the Himalayas get taller every year you know we say Sir Edmund Hillary climb was the first man to climb the world's tallest mountain well not really because Mount Everest today is almost two feet higher than it was when Sir Edmund Hillary climbed it thanks to the current movement of Asia into India into Asia it also explains why every ice age in the ice age cycle has gotten a little bit more severe than the previous one why because the Tibetan Plateau is continuing to go up and as it goes up more more ice covers the Tibetan Plateau during ease I say JH basically explains why we're still able to grow a huge amount of food in India and Asia and Southeast Asia during this interglacial because the last glacial was so severe we still have some ice I mean it's been 13,000 years since the end of the last ice age cycle that ice should have all gone away but because of how severe the last ice ages we still got ice and so they're still melting water from that ice that's able to feed the great rivers now three years ago geophysicist felt this was adequate to explain the ice age cycle astronomers jumped in and said no wait a minute even with these five unprecedented amazing tectonic events all happening simultaneously and by the way it's critical they all have to happen at the same time otherwise you don't get the combination that gives you adequate cooling but when astronomers looked at this and they added it all up they said it's still not enough to explain why we got ice and light if I was right the Sun and says there must be an additional cooling effect that we've overlooked to explain why we have this ice this has all been published in the past two years number one they figured out okay what actually started this ice accumulating over Antarctica and they determined that a collision event two point five eight million years ago just south of Chile this is newly discovered now that little red dot that you see at the bottom there that represents a place where an asteroid hit the earth two point five eight million years ago and it hit in a place where the ocean depth was about 17,000 feet and so it explains why we didn't discover the crater matter fact what happened is when they sent an exploration ship there and did deep-sea core drills they did not find a crater because it hit in such deep water there is no crater at the bottom but what they found is over region 60,000 square miles they found the isotope signature that tells them there had to be a major asteroid that hit that area and only recently have they done enough core drills they determine just how big that asteroid had to be bottom line it had to be at least a kilometer in diameter and it could be as much as two kilometers in diameter that means is one of the biggest asteroids to strike the earth in the past billion years when it hit the ocean it caused gigantic tsunamis a thousand feet high to radiate throughout the Pacific Ocean matter of fact they'd been able to confirm that this indeed was a giant asteroid collision event by looking at the tsunami wash up effects that they found in Australia New Zealand China they found at North and South America literally all over the Pacific Ocean we see this wash of debris that came up against the coastal land regions and on all the all-day 22.5 eight million years ago and the degree of wash up says yes we really are looking at tidal waves a thousand of feet high now because of how big that asteroid was it caused seawater to be thrown up into the atmosphere evaporated it did hit the bottom it didn't make a crater but it caused all the material at the bottom of the ocean floor likewise to be pushed up into the atmosphere including all the minerals that were in the salt water of the ocean and basically formed an aerosol cloud over the earth that blocked out the light of the Sun for several years and caused a cloud that actually reflected away sunlight and astronomers a Bailey terminal and Kalina Planet in order to have developed at ice age cycle and incidentally the date for the ignition of the ice age cycle 2.5 8 million years ago the same date we get for the asteroid collision so that's what star the ice age cycle but it took the combination of this asteroid collision event plus the five simultaneous tectonic events to explain why we're in an ice age right now now two point five eight million years ago the ice age cycle got ignited but it was a forty one thousand year cycle basically driven by the variation in the tilt of our rotation axis it goes back and forth with a cycle of 41,000 years today we have a hundred thousand year cycle that's a good thing if you got a forty one thousand year cycle the warm interglacials only lasts two or three thousand years that's not enough time for humans to launch global civilization we need a minimum of ten thousand years well newly discovered was another asteroid collision event this one and the South China Sea this one dated to eight hundred thousand years ago and there was several large islands here when this asteroid hit it basically obliterated those islands so all we have today are a few scattered tiny islands called the Spratly Islands you're probably aware that there's six nations all competing with one another for sovereignty over these islands China the Philippines Vietnam lots of nations are all claiming sovereignty over those islands because of their military importance but they're tiny islands basically obliterated by this event but this events sent up a huge debris cloud that's now circulating throughout our solar system and we passed through at every hundred thousand years and explains why the ice age cycle changed from a 41,000 year period to a hundred thousand year period and so it explains why - we see it being predominately dominated by the change in our eccentricity as opposed to our rotation axes tilt now we've been able to drill ice cores in the Alps in Greenland Antartica that basically tell us the global mean temperature throughout the ice age cycle this is the most detailed of them from Antarctica and it basically shows you the previous four ice ages and what you can see is how the temperature goes up rapidly and where you go down to just 10% ice coverage and then you get this long period where you've got 20% plus but what I want you to notice is how the temperature jumps up and down and so for example this is the previous ice age where he get rather dramatic movements of the global mean temperature it explains why the ice sheets were going back and forth is such a rapid rate incidentally it also explains why humans that were living here thirty forty thousand years ago were not able to develop global civilization we now have evidence that humans living thirty five thousand years ago actually we're developing bakery industry they were planting grains of different kinds harvesting those grains grinding the grains roasting the grains and making bakery products but all on a very small scale and let me just show you for example what they're up against this is a detailed picture of the global mean temperature during the last ice age where you see that the temperature is jumping up and down by 18 degrees Fahrenheit over timescales of just a few centuries with the temperature jumping up and down by that much with that degree of climate instability it's impossible for humans regardless of intellect and endeavor to develop any kind of sophisticated civilization in fact what was happening at that time humans would be planting crops but they were plant maybe 12 to 15 different kinds of crops knowing that the climate instability would destroy say 10 of them and they feed their families on the ones that actually survived it forced humans to have small farms or was mixed farming same thing with her animals they were domesticating animals but all in a small scale because they didn't know which kind of animal would survive the climate instability until we enter ninety-five hundred years ago and what you see there is for the first time in the history of the Ice Age cycle everything becomes stable in fact it's more stable than what that graph indicates this actually shows you the temperature as we're coming out of the last ice age going up and down and then we had this period of the past 9500 years where the global mean temperature is extremely stable so extremely stable that for the first time humans can begin to specialize this is when we see humans having farms that are like several square miles where they only grow wheat or the only grow rice or the only grow corn because they could count on the fact that they would get an abundant harvest that they could trade for products with other individuals also the first time where we see people specializing on goats or sheep where people would have say 10,000 sheep and that would be their whole industry and so time we actually have villages where they're not growing food at all they're making pottery products or engage in metallurgy and trading with one another this was the launch of human civilization where he got villages transportation systems people specializing where during the last ice age this period here 98% plus of the human workforce was devoted to come up with enough food to feed everybody what is it like today in the United States 1% of our workforce less than 1% of our workforce feeds the rest of us which means 99% of us do not have to be involved in agricultural industry we can be doing things like engineering science art music computer coding technological development it explains why technology today is advancing as rapidly as it is because we got the climate stability where you can actually have most of our workforce devoted to other enterprises besides coming up with a notch food now typically what happens is as you come out of an ice age the temperature goes up so extremely fast you wind up dropping into an ice age global warming always brings on global cooling we now know why when the temperature goes up about two degrees centigrade past where we are right now it melts the polar ice cap when you melt the polar ice cap instead of sixty percent of the sunlight being reflected away we have only six percent reflected away which means the ocean in the Arctic sea basically absorbs solar heat and what happens to that solar receipt it makes water vapor that now falls on Siberia and Canada has snow the only reason why Canada is not covered with thousands of feet of ice today it's a desert it only gets less than ten inches of precipitation per year not enough for the ice to accumulate but if you melt the polar ice cap which is what will happen with ongoing global warming then you get twenty inches of precipitation falling over Canada which is enough to cover all of Canada with thousands of feet of ice in short order and likewise that happens in Siberia what prevented that from happening this time is you've got this major cooling event the Younger Dryas event the temperature is going up then it drops down and it stays down and doesn't reach its maximum just a few months ago we came up with the answer what explains this interruption and the typical warming you get for the ice age cycle where we got this dramatic cooling event such a dramatic cooling event it stopped the temperature from going up to its normal maximum and stop the melting of the polar icecap well just a few months ago they found another place in the world where there was an asteroid collision no the one in the off of Chile it was difficult to find because it was under 17,000 feet of ocean water this next one was difficult to find because it's under 3,000 feet of ice that little red dot there shows you word hit in Greenland and the crater is literally 3,000 feet below the surface ice well we now understand is that when that hit had melted a lot of the ice in Greenland but we also it took place at a place where it also hits some landmass and it caused debris to fall all over North America now at that time when the asteroid hit we're talking just 12,000 years ago when it hit we have ice rapidly receding from North America but have formed a gigantic glacial lake this is Lake Agassiz this huge lake over Minnesota and Manitoba and Saskatchewan so this is cold glacial water and when the asteroid hit on Greenland it caused a bombardment of boulders to fall in this region and what was happening was Lake Agassiz was draining down towards the Gulf of Mexico the bombardment blocked that flow and forced the water from Lake Agassiz to glow through the st. Lawrence and the rest of it to go up through the McKenzie into the Arctic but in both cases that cold glacial water fresh water began to surround Greenland and basically pushed back the Gulf Stream and resulted in a major global cooling effect and explains why we've not yet melted the polar ice cap and explains why we've had this period of extreme climate stability and is this a coincidence it's also that time when we have no nearby supernova eruptions my peers have actually determined recent supernova events so for example during the last ice age from 50,000 years ago actually 40,000 years ago to 15,000 years ago there were four supernova eruptions that happened closer to us than eight hundred light years some as close as 300 light years not enough to kill us but enough to impact our health and enough to significantly degrade agricultural productivity and so that also explains why humans during the last ice age were not able to grow enough food to set free people to do engineering in science the supernovae are getting in the way and incidentally that was the typical rate that's the typical rate for a Milky Way galaxy during this period of extreme climate stability that we've had for the past ninety five hundred years is identical to the period where we've had no nearby supernova eruptions this is a list of all the supernovae that have happened in the past ten thousand years notice the closest is five thousand light years away far enough away where it has zero effect on human health and zero effect on the productivity of our cultivated fields but this is the only period in the history of the earth where we haven't had any supernova closer to us than five thousand light years that was the only period we've had none closer than a thousand light years and then something I explained in my book improbable planet is that we're living in multiple narrow time windows that all exactly overlap to give us a period have extreme climate stability the other thing that I think is really interesting is that this asteroid that hit in Greenland prevented the temperature from going up but it's also a period when our rotation axis tilt is declining which means we're getting colder and colder a matter of fact let me see if I can pull this mama I don't take too much time but you'll see in a blog article that I've written how the global mean temperature over the past 95 hundred years is declined by 0.9 degrees centigrade it should have declined by 15 degrees centigrade it didn't happen what prevented that from happening is as a rotation axis tilt was cooling the planet humans took advantage of the climate stability and began to domesticate cows and domesticate rice and cut down forests and make pasture lands for their cows all those are warming effects cows emit huge quantities of methane and carbon dioxide and that actually warms a planet when we irrigate the fields to make rice that produces methane the methane in the atmosphere is doubled since humans began to launch global civilization and methane has a very powerful greenhouse gas and so as we have the rotation axes tilt wanting to cool the planet by 12 degrees centigrade we got human activity through the domestication of rice the cutting down of trees and the domestication of cows warming the planet by virtually the identical amount now it's such that the human activity didn't quite balance the cooling effect and so over 9,500 years of temperature is dropped by 0.8 degrees but only by 0.8 degrees but what I can share with you in the last 70 years human activity has accelerated the warming of the planet or in the last 70 years the global mean temperature has gone up one degree centigrade if it goes up another degree and a half we will melt the polar ice cap and bring on an ice age but as it is we've had 9,500 years of extreme climate stability and said extreme climate stability that makes possible the existence of global human civilization the setting free of enough people where we can have billions of us living here one time where billions of us are not engaged in agricultural activity or billions of us are engaged in engineering science mathematics medicine art music and explains why we have such a rich culture today now you heard earlier I'm not only an astrophysicists I'm also a pastor of a church that's sandwiched between Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory we're also really close to the headquarters of the skeptic Society and to fuller seminary I lead a class for skeptics every Sunday that's a class where we basically say hey I got a curriculum I'm teaching but you can interrupt me anytime with questions and any topics and because we always have so many of these atheists and skeptics from the skeptic Society coming in and all these engineers and scientists from Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory every Sunday is an engaging debate but it's an engaging debate when we deal with issues like you heard today and basically have people think about this as this some kind of cosmic accident and basically I'm telling you here today none of this is an accident every event in the universe every event in the history of the earth every event in the history of life over the past 3.8 billion years and every component of the universe earth and earth life plays a role and making it possible for billions of us to live in this planet at one time and to develop the technology and the education and the capacity to investigate the universe where we realize the universe is not only fine-tuned to make possible our existence it's fine-tuned to bring about the complete eradication of evil and suffering something I've written about my book why the universe is the way it is the whole universe has to exist to make it possible for one planet and which humans can live the whole universe make it any bigger any smaller we wouldn't be here but the laws of physics the size of the universe the mass of the universe and even the space-time dimensions are all designed to be tools in the hand of the creator to completely eradicate evil and suffering and you heard the introduction I was not raised in a Christian home I was raised by people who didn't believe in fact I didn't actually get to meet Christians until I showed up at Caltech to take up a research pose as a research fellow that's where I first met believers however by looking at the world's holy books I noticed a difference in Hinduism Buddhism Islam Baha'i and all the other religions it's a one creation model in Christianity it's a two creation model how God designs a universe with the laws of physics and the dimensions so that evil can be completely eradicated while human free will is being enhanced and once that happens once billions of people have had that experience then God will take us from this creation into a brand new creation a new creation where evil will never exist again where they'll be no suffering where will no longer be constrained by gravity thermodynamics and electromagnetism or be constrained only for space-time dimensions will be delivered into realm will be able to express our free will to far greater capacity than we can today before me was a great multitude that no one can count from every nation tribe people and language referring to the huge host the billions of people that'll be enjoying life in the new creation and so place was radically different physics and you can read about it an improbable planet and also my book why the universe is the way it is I'm going to devote the rest of the time to questions on any subject you care to raise it doesn't have to be in what we talked about today but I'm sure I given you enough content you could do that thank you very much dr. Ross we have some microphones come around just a second I'm sure there's a lot of questions that was a lot of information a lot of interesting information wasn't it Wow are you glad you came today all right just a second we got some yeah exactly just a second we got some Mike's coming around please wait to get a mic anybody gonna be wet raise your hand if you've got a question yeah I got this one over here one over there yeah go ahead yes [Music] it's on it's me you talked about the asteroids hitting and impacting the climate what's the chances of that happening again the future to distort this timeline and day climate well when these asteroid collision events were being discovered there was a huge amount of skepticism among scientists the skepticism arose because they said this is way too frequent of these kinds of events asteroids that a kilometer cross in diameter hit the earth about once every 10 or 20 million years and to get three of them and this short period of time they just said this can't possibly be however we now have the evidence that makes us undeniable we see the crater under that 3,000 feet of ice we can see what happened at the Spratly Islands we've done surveys at the bottom of the ocean floor off of Chile there's no doubt that these events happen there's no doubt that these are really big asteroids but the question is why so many big ones in such a tiny period of time and why now because we're halfway between spiral arms when you cross a spiral arm is when you really get an Enhanced bombardment of asteroids and comets and so I had billion years ago we were being bombarded a lot more intensely but this is a time when we should be getting very few collision events and yet we got three really big ones in the recent history the earth one is recent has just 12,000 years ago and so the question is why but as I write about in my book and my articles notice that all three have to be exactly the size they are hitting exactly the locations they are at just the right time that they do in order for us to have this a period of extreme climate stability the Creator is throwing rocks at our planet but he's actually hitting the target exactly where it needs to be and hitting it at just the right time with just the right intensity so we can actually enjoy a lecture in this theater hall today right there very interesting presentation I just have one question and that is have you ever looked for what you would consider non human life on other planets yes that's a question that was addressed about 40 years ago where my colleagues were speculating maybe it's not life as we know it and so they began to consider what about the possibility of silicon-based life or boron base life or arsenic base life and what they discovered is that carbon is the only game in town carbon is the only element in the periodic table where you have the necessary bonding stability and the bonding complexity to make all the proteins DNA and RNA or the equivalent such molecules of sufficient complexity or life would be possible and so it doesn't have to look like us but it's got to be carbon base and when I write about the fine-tuning and by the way you can go to our website reasons org slash fine-tuning that will pop up for you a 300 page compendium where we list most of the fine-tuning evidence and that fine-tuning evidence simply sub presupposes if its life it's got to be carbon-based we don't care what kind of carbon-based life it is but just simply the recognition is carbon base explains all the fine tuning that you see in that compendium got a question please raise your hand yeah and is there a mic back the reason I came to got a mic yeah right there in the back dr. Auster's we've had all over the world how they were affecting our planet the nuclear disasters things like Chernobyl things like what happened in Japan here ago fortunately those have all been relatively minor nuclear disasters probably the most dramatic one was the Chernobyl one and even today it's not safe to walk around Chernobyl however I was in Kiev back in 1990 where people were worried about water from the nipa River it was safe to drink even though it went right by trinova so but there are reasons why we should be careful with our nuclear reactors and I mean that's one reason why it's expensive is it as a build a nuclear reactor but in favor of nuclear power you actually release much more radiation deadly radiation to the environment by burning coal than you do by getting electricity from nuclear fission so nuclear fission is actually safer than burning coal Cole's got uranium and thorium in it when you burn it it gets into the atmosphere you breathe it it's a good reason why we shouldn't be burning as much coal Ezra Bernie hmm very interesting way down here I again would like to thank you for being here this is very very interesting what do you make of the theory that during the formation of our solar system that we were protected by another planet that kept asteroids and other particles away from us yeah that actually came out of a Caltech in the 1980s an astronomer I knew they I actually found this infrared source and there was a brief period of speculation that maybe what he discovered was a distant planet way beyond her solar system that played that a protective role we now know that infrared source is actually an extremely distant quasar and we've done some searches around our solar system with much more advanced telescopes and the bottom line is there is no planet Nibiru or Planet X that's orbiting our solar system however we do know there might be a planet about ten times the mass of the earth that could be orbiting about 50 times farther away than Neptune orbits in fact there is a what we discovered is several of the distant asteroid orbits and the Kuiper belt overlap and the overlaps suggests doesn't prove but suggests there may be there's a distant small planet orbiting the solar system and several astronomers are trying to determine whether or not that planet exists it was actually predicted by a group of French astronomers French and American astronomers who noticed some it was actually built into my talk but I skipped it because of time how we're now able to see asteroid and comet belts outside of our solar system so but what we're seeing is most of them 90% of the stars that have planets have no asteroid and comet belts the 10% that do have asteroid and comet belts that are a thousand times bigger than ours and if there are a thousand times bigger you're gonna be bombarded all the time with giant asteroid things not a pleasant thing to think about however to have none poses a problem because we lose a little bit of water to outer space that water is replaced by comets bringing water back in remember I was talking about Mars gets its ice cap replace well likewise our planet earth the water that we lose is replace by comets bringing fresh supplies of water in but if you got no comets that's not going to happen and that means our earth would be desiccated over a long period of time and what we now all know is why we're unique most planetary systems have gas giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn and they migrate in towards our star and typically they migrate all the way into the orbit of Earth and Venus and when that happens they obliterate all the comet an asteroid belts and so most of the planetary systems we observe outside of our solar system the gas giants are orbiting close to their stars and explains why they have no asteroid and comet belts now the ones that do have asteroid and comet belts are where the gas giants stay far away gas giant planets can only form far from their stars because he need that to get all like gas to be in a frozen state and for those they don't migrate at all what was unique about our solar system Jupiter Saturn Uranus and Neptune migrated in towards our Sun and it reached a point where Jupiter was making exactly two orbits for every single orbit of Saturn and because Jupiter and Saturn are the most massive of the gas giants and the closest to the start of the Sun had caused a reversal and so the gas giants moved in stopped changed direction and moved back out that explains why we have small asteroid and comet belts but they've not been completely obliterated but to make that model work you have to have five gas giant planets or one of the five gets kicked out and the one that got kicked out may be this distant planet 50 times farther away the Neptune or it may got completely kicked out within a year or two we'll know which model is right got all that now just amazing I just whoa okay right over here I see a question this is something I've been curious about freeze ever since the man on the moon and then we got those little carts running around Mars do you think anybody or will ever get anything on the Sun or is it just too damn hot yeah we're not going to be visiting the Sun do you get very close to the Sun that basically vaporizes your spaceship and vaporizes the astronauts yeah I mean you can certainly get closer to the Sun than you can get to mercury not with people and by the way there is a new piece of research done on mice which basically demonstrates that once you get outside of Earth's magnetosphere your digestive tract gets destroyed say how quickly within 90 days which means we're not sending people to Mars we're not sending people to mercury we can send people to the moon because that's close enough that we can get there and back before our digestive tracts get destroyed and the magneto spheres sometimes also includes the moon but yeah we now recognize Mars is going to be done with machines humans aren't going to get there unless there's some human you want to send there Elon Musk yeah all right over here could you explain how the scientists know were Earth's landmasses were millions of years ago yes we can actually trace the movement of these continents so we can actually measure the movements they are today and project back in time the other thing we notice is that we can see for example that South America and Africa had to be joined together they've actually look at the west coast of from the east coast of South America and the west coast of Africa you can see how they fit together like a jigsaw puzzle likewise we see that with the australian bight notice the south part of australia is kind of curved like that the curve actually fits where Antarctica split off we can actually trace through the interior movements of the earth where the continents were for the past two and a half billion years so that's actually we can establish this Ice Age cycle or probably this supercontinent cycle where the continents come together split apart come together and split apart we know for example a detailed history of the growth of the continental land masses that I just put up an article on June 11th that June 11 today's new reason to believe talks about how just before the first oxygenation event the continents covered less than 2% of the surface of the earth the oxygenation event jumped that up to 27% in just a few million years oxygen plays a key role and they build off of the continental land masses and so we can actually trace in detail the oxygen history of the earth through taking isotope measurements and the dating the time when those took place if you want the details I put them in and probable planet and in that book I always give you a link right to the research papers that I'm citing so you can read the research papers for yourself and say I'm not sure I'm competent enough to read those papers good news is this every science research paper they publish an abstract where they give you the bottom line and the abstracts by law are free to the public you don't have to pay for them often you got to pay 20 bucks to read the whole paper but you can always read the abstract for free and we always give you a link right to that abstract right up here yeah right getting back to our present-day belief or disbelief of climate change is there anything that we can do to from what you're saying it's going to go whatever way it goes even if we take reasonable actions to stop the warming effect is this true is there some practicality and what you're saying that we can do now sure just one week ago I finished my next book and won't come out for a few more months but the book basically addresses your question because there's a lot of material being published making the point that human activity is warming the planet and unless we make draconian economic sacrifices were going to be in big trouble now that's kind of the Al Gore approach he wrote a book and did a movie called An Inconvenient Truth I'm trying to get a title passed her editors I'm not sure I'm gonna make it but the title I want from my book is a very convenient truth we've had this amazing period of climate stability and we got the wherewithal to sustain that climate stability for at least another thousand years maybe even longer and we can do it without trakone Ian's economic sacrifices and so I got several chapters in the book right talk about how we live in a planet that's been designed by our Creator so and we face issues in obeying the command that he gave us in job and Genesis to manage the planet for your benefit and the benefit of all life it's crucial received both those points our benefit and the benefit of all life which implies there will be solutions to our ecological and environmental crises that will benefit us and benefit all the rest of life on the plan at the same time so basically I'm doing this book is basically encouraging us exhorting us to look for those solutions and I actually give a couple of dozen such solutions in the book which would actually restore climate stability at the same time boost the world economy Democrats are gonna love it Republicans are gonna love it who's gonna vote against the solution that basically improves the environment stabilizes the climate and puts more money in everybody's pockets I'll give you a couple of examples okay we have made the Sahara Desert 10 times bigger than what it was in the days of the Roman Empire what we could do and the reason why it's so much bigger people on the south edge of the Sahara Desert have been stripping that edge of vegetation for cooking fuel and during the 1960s and 70s the Sahara Desert was moving south at a rate of six miles per year because of people stripping the land of vegetation what we could do is go to those sub-saharan populations and say we're gonna give you all the kerosene you want free of charge use it any way you want on the condition you work with us to replant the Sahara Desert and bring it back to what it was during the Roman Empire or what is now the Sahara Desert fed Europe with grain okay we could replant the Sahara Desert that would give an income for all those North African peoples and it would soak up huge quantities of greenhouse gases who's not gonna want it how quickly could that be done it could be done in less than a generation and a half it could also be done with the Gobi Desert the other thing we could do is restore the whale populations this has just been newly discovered in fact one of these papers was just published two months ago how whales fertilize the photic zone of the ocean and 70% of the life on planet earth of Toles greenhouse gases of the atmosphere are the phytoplankton in the oceans whales fertilize those phytoplankton and they're the only creatures that do so if we can bring the whale population back up to where it was before the pre whaling days that would mean we'd have an increased population of phytoplankton which gives us an increased population of zooplankton which would give us an increased population of fish which gives an increased population giant squid by the way so they discovered this sperm whales are beginning to recover sperm whales only eat giant squid but what they notice is with the return of the sperm whales we got more giant squid and they're bigger they said how could this be they only have one predator the sperm whales whoa they discovered as sperm whales fertilized the phytoplankton which makes more roars Oh plankton which makes for more fish which means a giant squid Oh got more food to eat which explains why we got more giant squid and we got bigger body sizes for the giant squid and so what this means for human beings is that we have a shortage of fish in the oceans today we could restore the fish population which means there be more income and there'd be a healthier diet for the world's people at the same time we pull huge quantities of greenhouse gases of the atmosphere if you want another two dozen wait a few months in the book of the oh I do have four of those in the book and probable planet all right we have time for two or three questions this started over here I was interested in knowing there was another cataclysmic if event when the dinosaurs died yes that was the reason they died was because again the clouds covered the earth bright particulate matter the whole thing what I'm curious about is the dinosaurs were huge we never had anything as huge except perhaps the mammoths that followed right but even they were in know what was the constant Constitution of the air that permitted such a you would we have been able to live at the same time well the oxygen content was roughly the same as it is now the reason why you have these huge land animals on the face of the earth that was a time when the continents were covered with these huge a shallow seas so half of North America was a huge shallow sea same thing was true of all about a third of South America and a lot of Asia was covered with these shallow seas which means that for the first time was possible for the creator to create really big land Anna because now he had the water to provide the buoyancy to support that high body mass the biggest animal in the face of the earth today a land animal is an elephant and that's at the limit that the laws of physics will tolerate if you make a land mammal any bigger without water support that animal will injure itself quickly because of the law of gravity I mean you see that watching the NBA who are the players that get the greatest number and most devastating injuries it's the guys that are seven and a half feet tall and weigh 300 pounds the law of gravity basically has its consequences there's an advantage to not being tall when you fall you don't hurt yourself so much well the same principle happens with land animals however if you've got say 15 feet of water that water now provides enough buoyancy that you can have a land animal that weighs 50 tons whereas without water buoyancy your limit is about six tons like you see with the elephants or the mastodons and it's a principle you see in Psalm 104 how God pacts the planet with as much life as possible as diverse as possible basically making a point when the geography is different you're gonna have different animals and so with shallow seas yeah now you can pack the planet with really big land animals namely the dinosaurs is what's interesting the biggest dinosaurs we see during the dinosaur years are at the limit of what the laws of physics will tolerate you can't have bigger dinosaurs than we actually see in the fossil record but they can only have them there when you got these large shallow seas to provide the water buoyancy that they need to prevent themselves from injuring themselves it explains why the biggest animal that has ever existed is a blue whale but the blue whale is a hundred percent supported by water buoyancy interesting explains a lot of my personal problems all right all right question right down here can you explain a little bit more about your faith convictions and how those intersect with your scientific explorations yes I was born raised and educated in Canada where I lived there were no believers but I became interested in astronomy when I was seven and I was actually reading five books on physics and astronomy per week among the autistic spectrum those of us knew I just expect and kind of behave like that were natural nerds but it was my astronomy that persuaded me Big Bang cosmology Rudy explains the origin history of the universe and his Big Bang cosmology that means universe has a beginning so starting at age 17 I began to search for that cosmic beginner the first place I looked was in the writings of Immanuel Kant and Rene Descartes because those were the European philosophers who wrote the most about cosmology but a discovered day and the wrong concepts of space and time and so I began to look at the different holy books that undergird the religions of the world and began to test them well that I knew to be true from geography science and history and I was able to quickly go through the Hindu Vedas is where I start at first and they talk about an oscillating universe a reincarnating universe and where reincarnates with a cycle of four point three two billion years I recognized the number was wrong and also they were wrong about the entropy of the universe about a year later I picked up a Gideon Bible and began to go through that and realize pick on all the science a hundred percent right and was the only book that predicted future scientific discoveries what astounded me is that it actually predicted that we live in an expanding universe with a space-time beginning where the laws of physics never change and where one of those laws is a pervasive law decay which implies you must be living in a universe that gets colder and colder and a highly predictable rate and I particularly want to impress me astronomers began to develop the capability to measure the past temperature the at different epochs all the way back to 13 billion years ago and those temperature measurements perfectly fit what the Bible predicted thousands of years ago and also seeing how the Bible predicted future historical events and so I persuaded me this has to be a communication from the one that actually created and designed the universe for our benefit and so after studying a Gideon Bible for two years the Gideon's have a place where you can sign your name where you commit your life to make the Creator the master of your life and to receive his offer of redemption from the evil that surrounds us and said that sounds like a really good deal so I sign my name in that book but ever since then I've found a perfect fit between the book of nature and the book of Scripture and so reasons to believe as an organization I found it basically to test different faith beliefs because what we see in the Bible is a statement that the more we learn about nature the more evidence we'll find for the supernatural handiwork of the Creator and so that's why I produce a blog every week giving you that increasing evidence and why on my Twitter page I give you links at a rate of about three research papers a day that give us more evidence for the Christian faith and reliability of the Bible the Bible commands us to objectively test every belief and so we're basically demonstrating that through the book of nature it's a to of God gave us to test our belief systems thank you one last question I know it's running a little late but just hang with us go ahead thank you very much for an interesting lecture you talked about all this creation stuff but when when did man come did he evolve as an eighth did he evolved from one of these other creatures and how do you know that there isn't some other kind of life form there starting now as we started okay those are good questions and one of the books that you can get at reasons to believe is on human origins it's a foreigner page book so it's quite detailed answering those kinds of questions but this is an area where we need to do interdisciplinary work and so one of things we've noticed for example is when humans were first here about a hundred thousand years ago or fifty to a hundred thousand there were over 8,000 mammal species on the face of the earth today there's only four thousand half of them have gone extinct during that human period we've not seen the appearance of a single mammal species so the extinction rate has eliminated half of them the replacement rate is zero this led conservation biologists to do field studies what's going on with these mammals and many field experiments basically demonstrate that with a terrestrial land mammal with an adult body size less than three kilograms that is less than seven pounds it goes extinct before it can evolve into a different mammal species now there's a dozen different species of bipedal primates that precede human beings that have been discovered but one of them was published in the british journal Nature of just yesterday you can read about it brand-new species that they have found there all have adult body sizes bigger than seven pounds which means they're not going to evolve one into the other and was Ian Tattersall who communicated to us at reasonably Ian Tattersall is an anthropologist who's an atheist but he was the one that pointed out to us notice these bipedal primate species are limited to Europe Asia and Africa we've yet to find fossils on North America South America or Australia so the other thing in notice is that when humans moved into Australia they quickly drove to extinction 94% of the large body burden mammal species have lived there and hence they never got out of the Stone Age they killed off all the animals they needed for civilization they killed off the horses the camels the sheep they were all killed off and to us - not quite to the same degree the same thing happened in North and South America South America the extinction rate was 79% North America 73% Africa has 10 of those dozen species the extinction rate when humans entered Africa was only 4.5 percent and was Ian's Tattersall Allah said when you actually look at these bipedal primate species of precede humans the cranial capacity goes up and down it's not this linear evolutionary pattern where the cranial capacity gets bigger and bigger with respect to time it goes up then it goes down it goes up it goes down likewise the bike pedal capability goes up and down there is no linear progression and his comment is every time we find a new fossil of a bipedal primate it throws or evolutionary models into chaos and a good example of that is what got published on Wednesday in the british journal Nature again is throwing everything into chaos but he says the one thing that fits as you look at this sequence or the past six million years we see that these bipedal primates are progressively more capable in hunting large body burden mammal species and for example the Neanderthals have preceded us it seems like they exclusively survived on the meat of large bodied burden mammal species and was Ian Tattersall who says I think what was going on is these animals were step-by-step trained when you see big animals walking on two feet with weapons in their hands run and so what we see is a survival rate that's very high in Africa and a survival rate that was extreme in Austria but one had the bipedal primates the other one didn't and what makes us human beings unique we're the one bipedal primate that's got symbolic capability we're the one bipedal primate where the technology advances well we see with Neanderthals that technology was limited to shaping single stones and the technology at the beginning of the Neanderthals on the face of the earth is the same as at the end and in every case these bipedal primates were the exception of us human beings can't figure out what a stop sign means or a railway crossing can't make a number system no mathematical capability and they don't have an alphabet they're not able to communicate with a large vocabulary as we see with humans even very young humans they develop a large vocabulary quickly and they just seem to have an innate capacity for symbolic facility I think one of the more dramatic examples of that has put a computer in front of a nine month old child and see how quickly they pick up that symbolic capability it's utterly amazing how quickly they pick it up but that's unique to human beings we don't see it many non-human animal and the other interesting thing is there is a paper published in science and was titled Darwin's mistake it was basically making the point that Darwin said of my model is correct the animal that's most similar to us physically will also be the most similar to us intellectually and so he was predicting that the chimpanzee would be the smartest of the non-human animals and he encouraged people 170 years ago to put his claim to the test no one did until 9 years ago it's the first time anyone ever did an experiment to test his claim and that experiment basically points out chimpanzees are not the smartest non-human animals crows and ravens are the smartest non-human and so when you say that someone is a birdbrain it may be a compliment well thank you very much thank you to each of you for coming up we Lutz a little bit longer today I hope you appreciated that dr. Ross will be down here at the front if you want to talk with them we appreciate you see not next week no meeting next week come back in two weeks for Martha Barnett thank you so much you
