Jay Richards: The Privileged Planet

[Music] well it is so great to be in Dallas and I have driven by this church many times and never actually been inside it it's just extraordinary I know I speak for everyone to discovery and Sue thank you to this church and to the staff for letting us have this event here and this this crowd honestly this is on a Saturday morning to talk about science essentially an apologetics this is remarkable and so the the Discovery Institute staff in Seattle were somewhat skeptical I thought well maybe 80 or 100 people or I could get to see the demographics are quite different in Dallas and they are in Seattle it's a Texans actually knew that so it's great to be with you well you heard last night you heard this morning from Steve why don't want you to think about what we're doing today and last night it's sort of giving you a little low sigh little locations within the natural world in which the evidence for purpose in design speak really loudly the idea isn't that you know just that God every so often is sometimes involved and otherwise leaves the universe to go on its own but that rather God has created the universe he sustains it and then he leaves his fingerprints on the evidence is it Eric Metaxas said it's like every cell in our bodies has made in Yahweh signed on it and because of that there are places in which we gain new understanding about some aspect of the created order in which the evidence for purpose and design it just screams really loudly and really obviously for those with ears to hear and eyes to see and so that's what we're doing we're just sort of pointing at a few of those things and so Steve talked this morning about the evidence for a beginning and there's never been a better time in the history of the human race in some ways to be a theist and to doubt materialism because until the really their early into the mid 20th century you could reasonably think that the universe was eternal you could just sort of take its existence for granted so if somebody said where did the universe come from you could just say well I don't think it came from anywhere I just think it's the given thing it's the reality from which everything else comes no one expected that the universe itself would give observational evidence that it hasn't always existed think about that for a minute if you believe in God and you believe that in the beginning God created the heavens in the earth you believed that there was a beginning right but and people didn't really imagine they're actually looking through telescopes in developing high-level theories and physics to explain the movements of the universe would entail and then people would discover that the universe in fact had to have a beginning every time you hear the age of the universe sighted you should be amazed and wonder the universe has an age as Christians we often we get in arguments about what the age is and we miss the fact that if it has an age it had a beginning and if it had a beginning it can't always have existed so matter the material universe just can't be the fundamental reality unless you're willing to say is Stephen Hawking Hawking's did is Steve Meyer quoted here that the universe brings itself into existence so a thing that doesn't exist so if it doesn't exist it can't have causal powers right it can't have any properties cuz it doesn't exist nevertheless brought itself into existence with the law of gravity which is a property of the universe once it exists all right this is what you call the reduction to the absurd of materialism this is where we've gotten them now at the beginning of the 21st century if you're a material issues you have to say the universe which did exist created itself all right so my view as a Christian is look if you know if you want that proposal I didn't take that but that's not an especially sort of persuasive conclusion so we've got a universe with the beginning and then as you heard a hint of at the end of Steve's talk and as he talked about a bit last night and Eric talked about this morning the universe as we observe it at the universal scale so the properties that the universe has as a whole the things that are called that the fundamental constants of nature the constant just means it's constant it's the same here it's the same in the Andromeda galaxy everywhere we can look the gravitational force constant has the same value the electromagnetic force constant it has the same value so these are things that are true everywhere in the universe are exquisitely fine-tuned and in this sense then if they were slightly different let's say the gravitational force or the gravitation force was slightly stronger or slightly weaker you wouldn't just get a different universe you wouldn't get a universe at all you either get a universe that would has started its expansion and then we just dissipate into a kind of hydrogenated soup that doesn't do anything or you'd get an initial expansion in the university of collapse immediately back upon itself that's the idea so these constants it's like they're resting on a Razors Edge so that if they were slightly different you wouldn't get a universe that was compatible with any sort of life that's the so-called fine-tuning problem and it applies as I said to the constants it applies to the laws themselves which are these sort of you see them as equations with constants inside them and then it applies to the so-called initial conditions of the universe which is just the way that things would need to be set up at the beginning in order to have the the orderly universe that you have that we see before us think about it is this kind of vast billiard ball table with ten thousand balls right you're gonna try to sync them all at once you're gonna need the initial setup of the balls to be really special right to pull that off that's the initial conditions but the ways the balls interact how hard they can hit and those sort of things those are the constants that's the idea of the fine-tuning of the universe and I think it's one of those two pieces of evidence by themselves I would argue this isn't a deductive proof of the existence of God but it's one something you would absolutely expect if you believed in the existence of God and as Steve said these have profound theological implications theses are much more likely and make much more sense if there is a transcendent God than if the material story is true so if that is backdrop I want to talk a little bit about all the evidence essentially from the origin of the universe to the origin of the first life so I'm not going to talk about what you need to get life itself Steve's gonna actually I think talk about that after lunch and Jim tour is going to talk about that what I want to talk about is what do you need to get just to get a planet that can host life right you need certain ingredients just to get an environment in which life is possible so philosophers would say this is a question of what are the necessary conditions planet airily for life but I'm not going to talk about the sufficient condition so all that space before you get to the origin of life and this is the subject usually of astrobiology and of astronomy and then sometimes cosmology cosmology as Steve said that's just the study of the cosmos as a whole and you know that wasn't even a science in the early 20th century in fact many scientists said science doesn't even ask the question where the universe came from it just presupposes its existence but once we realize universe had a beginning and could study the universe as a whole a new science called cosmology developed and so now it's it's a respectable field but a lot of people don't know what that is in fact when I was writing the priviledge planet in here when I wrote this while doing other things and so a bunch of my part of the book was actually written on airplanes and so I tried to give off the vibe that I don't really want to talk when I'm riding on airplane you know I do this but some people don't kind of read the vibes exactly right and I remember I was working on this book and there was a woman sitting next to me and she was with another group of women that were in the you know rows around me they were all seemed very excited I said okay they're all friends so I'm gonna have a hard time here writing probably and so I'm trying to write and I could see her looking at me and looking at my screen within a few seconds no what are you doing oh I'm I'm just I'm writing a book it's a science book which usually that's a conversation killer right there okay no no that didn't do it and so you have oh what's it like and I was like now I'm gonna really kill it oh it's a book about cosmology and you know she said cosmology I can't believe it my friends and I we just came from a three-day conference on cosmology this is our stuff we live and breathe this stuff tell us about it and so we had a little bit of a conversation so they had gone to a Mary Kay convention this was possible yeah so so I didn't get anything written on that that flight so this was yeah cosmetology is not cosmology cosmology is the study of the universe as a whole and so really if you this is why it's so important because cosmology is you can imagine as one of the fields that touches closely on to philosophy and theology because you're talking about the whole show and so cosmologists tend to talk about these things and then astronomers in some ways by derivation tend to do that as well Eric Metaxas mentioned this morning Carl Sagan who's a now the deceased Carl Sagan but he was in the 70s in the 80s the leading public intellectual making the case for materialism that's now passed to Neil deGrasse Tyson and then Bill Nye the Science Guy so oh how the mighty have fallen we've got building high now instead of Carl Sagan and the Cornell professor but Sagan was a deeply committed materialist who also kind of wanted to have a type of spirituality and in a famous documentary series on PBS aired around 1980 called cosmos it comes on at one point in this and there's also a book based upon and he had a very nice sonorous voice and he says the cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be now any of you that go to a church that sings the Gloria Patri know what that what pets that he's echoing there as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be it's a reference to the eternal God who has always existed and Sagan is attributing to the creator or the to the created things things that ought to be attributed only to the creator but he knew exactly what he was doing he's saying the cosmos the physical universe it's the fundamental reality now this was 1980 merwin Eric Metaxas told you a little bit ago and what Steve was telling you about the 1920s Carl Sagan knew in 1980 that the scientific evidence itself suggested the universe had not always existed so why was he saying this in 1980 he was saying it because of the metaphysical pressure of materialism whatever your world view is you need a fundamental reality and that fundamental reality needs to always to have existed it needs to exist necessarily and so your guiness hold on to that commitment as long as you absolutely can and so Sagan was still willing to offer this doctrinal statement on PBS and PBS was perfectly happy to win willing to air it without any sort of disclaimers before after sort of an associate idea of this materialism is something called the Copernican principle and the Copernican principle just basically says the material universe is all it is and all that ever was and all that ever will be is here as the result of entirely blind and impersonal processes and as it turns out whatever happened here on the earth must have happened countless times elsewhere because there's nothing special about us or about our location in the universe about human beings or about the earth or anything like that and so this is just kind of something that follows if you're a materialist in Sagan wrote a book some time later called pale blue dot in which he offers this idea and in the book he reflects on an event but he was responsible for the Voyager satellites or the the satellites that the u.s. sent out to the outer reaches of the solar system in the late 1970s and when they got out past the orbit of Pluto Sagan was actually able to go to the NASA Administrator and ask them would you turn the cameras around to the inner part of the solar system and take a picture of the Earth from this it's about four billion miles away and this wasn't part of the mission but he had the kind of credentialing to be able to do this so they did and they took a picture and he said he was going to use it to help us realize how fragile our existence was hoping that it would bring human beings together to see this fragile little planet but when the pictures came out from NASA there's a sort of there's an error kind of a glitch in the photograph and that you've got a beam of sunlight and so what you see is a tiny little pale blue dot and then this little reflection of sunlight kind of cutting across it which is just sort of the optics of the picture and so then when he wrote the book this is what he actually said about it so this is the lesson that he ended up drawing from this photograph so because of the reflection of sunlight the earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light as if there were some special significance to this small world but it's just an accident of geometry and optics our posturings our imagined self-importance the delusion that we hold some privileged position in the universe are challenged by this point of pale light our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark in our obscurity in all this vastness there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves but you know this guy was a lot of fun at parties with this stuff it's you know but notice this is a different lesson this isn't let's let's be kind to each other into our fellow human beings because we just have one planet this was weird it just a speck of dust in the middle of some obscure part of the university as no sir no help coming from anywhere right now so the question is this is clearly a metaphysical and a philosophical claim I think a bad one no it's not that philosophical claims are bad this is this is bad leftover materialist philosophy that looks like it might be based on the evidence but is it true if any if we actually look at the evidence itself is it really true that we and the earth are an insignificant speck in the universe or is the truth otherwise well it turns out pretty much everything we learn and we know we find there's actually a heck of a lot very special about the earth itself just think nothing to change in the 1930s Orson Welles had a radio program called War of the Worlds that was a it was a you know fictional but it was about these Martians coming for Mars and invading the earth and people that came in late to listen to the War of the Worlds maybe come in after the beginning many Americans actually thought it was a radio program a news program and panicked about these Martians invading the reason is because a lot of people thought there might be intelligent aliens on Mars what do we do now we spend hundreds of millions of dollars to send pilots to Mars to look for evidence of liquid water in the distant past on Mars that's how precise we already realize that you need things to be in order for life to even be possible Mars is the most earth-like planet other than the earth that we've ever discovered the most earth-like and it's lifeless so that tells you that it sounds like you might need to get a whole lot of things right and this isn't just the result of a lack of imagination on the part of the history of astronomers in fact from chemistry itself we now know that the planetary requirements for life are going to be very very narrow you know there was a time when the periodic table the elements first of all it had inton constructed and then there was a time after the sort of general layout was constructed that there were some openings some elements that needed to exist but that hadn't yet been discovered like helium but now the periodic table the elements is filled in everywhere we look in every galaxy anywhere in the universe that we can see it's the same chemical elements obeying the same basic laws that will involve the same sorts of reactions and so we have know a heck of a lot based simply on the needs of life on a chemical basis for what you're going to need in any kind of planetary environment in this universe where the same laws of chemists chemistry hold and the result of that I'm just I'm just kind of lighting over a lot of details here and so I did but this is the gist of it if you're gonna have a complex life anywhere in the universe you're gonna want two things you're gonna want that life to be based on carbon chemistry and you're gonna want it to exist in the context of liquid water so a bunch of reasons for this but the simplest way to think about it is there's no other there's no other substance there's no other element in the universe like carbon that's really good both at building three-dimensional complex information rich molecules at coding linear information in molecules which is what you're going to need for chemically based life right both to build molecules and bodies and cells and things like that but also to encode information that can be passed on right so you that's just a basic need for any kind of life and so it's going to need to be able to be encoded and build up complex molecules but not be so stable that it can't undergo chemical reactions so it's gonna need to be what it's called metastable so just at the right sweet spot where it's stable enough that you can build a lot of complex stuff but not so stable that you can't have chemical reactions all right and so that's the one need you're gonna have the other thing is you're going to need a matrix where these chemical reactions can take place well it just so happens that carbon chemistry is most reactive over the same narrow range of temperatures over which water is liquid alright so think of the range of possible temperatures in the universe from you know intergalactic space near absolute zero to surface of stars there's only you know 100 degrees Celsius where water is liquid and there's one element that's most reactive over that same range so what that means is that liquid water and carbon chemistry are fit like a hand in glove for life and so this is why we don't waste our time looking for life on the Sun we send probes to Mars because we know you gotta have water and so it doesn't mean that if you have water it's to sort of just add water and you get life it's that you need at least water in order to have life now why does this matter it matters because what this means is we can already rule out even in a universe that is exquisitely fine-tuned for life a very big universe in which a lot of stuff can take place most of the places are not going to be compatible with life so already by itself we know that earth is going to be a very unusual place and everything we've learned in astrobiology and my co-author Guillermo Gonzalez is the expert in this and just summarizing it I have led to the conclusion as we learn more and more that the list of ingredients you need to build a so-called habitable planet just gets longer and longer and longer and more complex again this is a kind of cartoonishly simple idea here but what kind of things do you need it's I mentioned you need liquid water and you don't just need water sort of floating in interstellar space you need the right kind of planet you need a surface for that water and a surface for life not just any old kind of planet you need a so called terrestrial planet which that actually means earth-like but think of it as a rocky planet with a surface the planet needs to be the right size too small it won't be able to hold things and like an atmosphere on its surface too large and you end up with something like Jupiter or Saturn with way too much hydrogen and things like that so it needs to be the right size needs to be made up of the right kinds of things something like a liquid iron core like we have that creates a magnetic field around the surface of the planet which protects life and the atmosphere present you need a large stabilizing moon like ours the moon it turns out if we blow up the moon over several thousand years the earth that start wobbling erratically on its axis it also mess up the tides so we didn't know this but if the moon were not in our sky we probably would not be here because earth would not probably be compatible at least with large animal life you need plate tectonics that keeps the kind of long-range cycles of carbon up on the surface and keeps the stuff that life needs up near the surface she need the right kind of atmosphere probably in nitrogen and oxygen rich atmosphere again I'm just gliding over this but when you give carbon chemistry what you just some kinds of atmospheres that work in some that won't you need the right kind of planetary neighbors believe it or not astrologers always believe that the planets played some role in our existence I think they're wrong in general but they were right at least in this sense that if we didn't have large outer lying planets in our solar system like Jupiter and Saturn the inner part of the solar system would be visited by far more comets from the outer part of the solar system but because of these giant planets in the outer solar system they think of them as sentinels that protect our neighborhood of the solar system from too many bombarding comments comets are sort of like your crazy ants you don't want them visiting so often you know just every so often and unlike your ant their problem is they can vaporize life on a planet so it's like please don't visit very often and so you know actually the arranged something like that an arrangement of the solar system we have is actually really important for the habitability of Earth even though those other planets are inhabitable they play a role in making the earth habitable they need to be around the right kind of star the right size the right age it needs to almost certainly be a single star most stars in our galaxy are either together either triplet or triplet or binary stars you need to be in the right galaxies there right kind of galaxies you need to be in the right place in the galaxies the right the galactic location and you need to be at the right time in the history of the cosmos now I'm not going to assume that all of you just remember this from your 7th grade physics if you're a physics class and so I'm just gonna remind you so we are on a planet in a solar system around a single star we're the third planet from the Sun depending upon your partisan views on Pluto they're either eight or nine planets all right Pluto I'm the probe Pluto of partisan so nine your mo and I disagree on this okay our solar system so solar system means a system around this star that we call the Sun is just one of many stars in the Milky Way galaxy and I'll show you a picture of that in a minute and there may be between a hundred and three hundred billion stars just in the Milky Way the Milky Way itself is just one of between a hundred and three hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe so exponentially that would be 3 times 10 to the 22 total stars sort of available right so that's a very very big universe in a universe that is itself fine-tuned for the very much precisely fine-tuned for complex life so when you hear that picture and you say gosh you've got to get all that stuff right most people's intuitions if they haven't haven't bludgeoned out of them by a bad science or philosophy courses that just bespeaks design it's like Halley's watch resting on a Heath you need so many things to go right in a planetary environment that doesn't seem like that would happen by chance surely that by itself is designed now I think it it is but by itself any slightly skeptical philosopher will tell you by itself just saying that the conditions for life in a habitable environment are rare doesn't get you a good design argument and here's why all right so imagine I pull out a quarter from my pocket which I would do if I carried cash which I quit doing a few years ago so pretend all right and I say okay I'm gonna flip this coin ten times in a row and I'm gonna get ten heads and I tell you ahead of time so I start flipping it and everybody can see it right and I get ten heads in a row and I flipped it ten times now what are you gonna immediately think was that was that a fair coin you know he's got ten heads in a row and he told us he was gonna do that now is it logically impossible no but the vastly more likely scenario is that I know a trick I've got a magnetic thumb or a two-headed coin or something like that in other words design a set up rather than chances and much more likely explanation given that let's change the scenario let's say I'm gonna get ten heads in a row with this quarter and nobody's leaving until I get 10 heads in a row and you hear the doors lock all right and then I start flipping and I'm really I'm fast but I'm not that fast let's say get a hundred flips a minute or something like that right and so this goes on for a few weeks and so some of you don't make it unfortunately because of the your advanced age or whatever but a few of you managed to survive and you've been here for a long time you know then we bring in water and you've been here a few weeks and I eventually get ten heads in a row now at that point are you gonna say Oh chance could never have caused that no because the opportunities for chance to operate were so wide right and so ten heads in a row is bound to happen if you flip the coin a million times you're gonna get that a lot it's actually not that hard I did this for my most recent book and I thought I need to make sure it's fair and so I flipped a nickel fairly 10 10 times in a row and I got seven heads in a row just by chance right so if you flip it a million times that's gonna happen this is the problem here is that we know that earth-like planets are going to be extremely rare in the universe relative to the number of places that you could be but by itself just something being highly improbable isn't a good design argument if there's also a whole lot of chance for room to operate and so the skeptic could say I grant you that earth-like planets are probably really rare they're not common like Sagan said nevertheless it might just be whatever you think about the beginning and cosmic fine-tuning that this stuff just probably happened by a kind of cosmic lottery and so that's why the argument that we actually make in the priviledge planet isn't isn't simply that it's this it's the idea that habitability those things the planet needs for life correlates with measurability those things that life needs also set up the best conditions for doing natural science all right so I wanted that to sink in because this is a different argument than the one you might have expected to hear here's how we put it in the book by the way this was GMOs idea for the title of the book was habitability correlates with measurability and so if that had been the title we wouldn't be here at this conference probably because nobody would have heard of this book so he came up with a better title later but this is the basic idea here's that here's how we put in the book it's I use the same narrow circumstances that allow us to exist also provide us with the best overall setting for making scientific discoveries or to put it differently the very conditions that make Earth's hospitable to intelligent life also make it well-suited to viewing and analyzing the universe as a whole so the idea is that those rare places where observers can exist also happen to be the very best places compared to the other up options for doing observing now this is one of these arguments called accumulative case argument where you have to give lots of examples which I can't do just a few minutes so what I want to do is just kind of give you a couple of hints of what we're talking about is examples of what we call this correlation between life and discovery perfect eclipses solar eclipses and galactic location how many of you have summer before last were in the path of totality for the solar eclipse so some of you some of you thought you saw it because you're at 85% you didn't see nothing trust me you got to be in the totality it's absolutely unbelievable so in 2024 you'll have another chance so find your way to the path of totality and see a perfect solar eclipse or a total solar eclipse so why is it so special why is it so unusual well it's because of this very weird coincidence people have known about for hundreds of years but had never really thought about now what is an eclipse or a solar eclipse forget it solar eclipse how to see it you need for things to happen really five things all at once you need a luminous body like the Sun you need an eclipsing body in our case it be the moon you need an observer platform where observers can be you need them to be the right distances apart and then you all you need them all to line up in a straight line in space and when these things happen this set of coincidences then if you're in the right place on the surface of that observable observer platform you will see the moon the eclipsing body pass in front of the luminous body in our case the Sun and what people often don't really think about is that we don't just get total solar eclipses or eclipses of some sort we get what you might call perfect eclipses in which there is this near perfect match between the apparent size and shape of the moon and the Sun on the sky you can think about this these are totally different bodies you know the moon is about 400 times closer than the Sun from the earth it's also 400 times smaller and so as a result of that you get this earring match between the sizes of these two things and you get this weird match where right during totality you can't do two twenty seconds for totality you can't look at it with the naked eye the the photosphere of the Sun is so bright you'll just totally mess up your eyes as soon as it goes into totality you can pull those those dark glasses off and you look directly at it you can see this outer part of the the sun's atmosphere that you normally can't see my co-author Guillermo Gonzalez in the late 1990s about the time we met started thinking about this you know this is weird I wonder if you were on other planets in the solar system if you could see eclipses like this or what what would the other eclipses be like and the other planets with with moons in the solar system and so he did a study published an article in 1999 is one of these things is much more fun to report that I'm sure it was to actually gather the data on but what this is this diagram it take me about 10 minutes to fully fill it out for you but what I want you to see is you've got a list of the planets on the left-hand side and then left to right you've got what's called the angular size ratio of a satellite to the Sun so basically this think of it is the size that something appears on your sky across it a sort of angle right and if you have a ratio of 11.0 that means that they have exactly the same size on your sky all right and then there's a dotted vertical line going sort of down the middle of the diagram now those little horizontal dashes what those are is those are that basically where the different planets would be around the you know if you're around Jupiter for instance supers got a lot of moons so you can see IO and gaining need and you're open and Callisto they're too large so that their moons would be much larger than the Sun Saturn has a bunch the long story short run your eye down that that middle line the middle dashed line and you notice two little lines that cross it one for Earth and one for Saturn now the one for Saturn is a moon called Prometheus which is potato shaped and it whips around but a long one axis it would be about the size of the Sun for maybe a second right but notice that the moon crosses that line precisely in other words there's one place where you get this perfect match between the shape and the size of the moon in the Sun in the solar system it's the one place where there are observers to appreciate them now by itself that's just a weird thing to keep you up at night that's not by itself a design argument right and so what does that have to do with anything well now let me put the book two and two together here because I remember I told you a minute ago there are a couple of really important conditions that you need for a habitable planet one is remember I told you you need a large well-placed moon in others you need to be around the right kind of star and then you also need I may not have even said you need to be the right distance from your host star in the so-called Goldilocks zone where it's not too hot and not too cold for liquid water and so when you get those two things you get the large well-placed moon that's gonna fix what your moon looks like in your sky in the size of it and then you need to get the right distance from your host star that's gonna fix the appearance of the size of your Sun in your sky when you get two of these ingredients for building a habitable planet it produces perfect solar eclipses unlike all these other options and as it happens perfect solar eclipses play a very important role in the history of scientific discovery solar eclipses are like natural experiments set up to allow us to make scientific discoveries it would be very hard to do otherwise just give you one example very briefly we talked a bunch of out in this in the book if you feel like I just couldn't have brushed over this we can punish you with a 444 page book that gives you absolutely all the details and you can get it outside alright so I admit I'm glossing over this but Steve Meyer mentioned relativity and the idea of general relativity which is really Einstein's theory of gravity that he hoped would explain pretty much the sort of large movement of everything in the universe and as he mentioned according to general relativity gravity is essentially the effect of mass on space-time and so depending in the more mass of a body the more that body curves space-time and one of the implications of Einstein's theory is that massive a really massive body should be significant enough to curse space-time enough did that the space-time around that body would actually change the trajectory of light passing nearby it so he made a prediction that if you were to test the starlight from stars near the surface or the edge of the Sun rights are behind but near the passing near the edge of the Sun during the solar eclipse and we're able to map those stars at another time when the Sun wasn't in the sky that it would look like those stars had moved and gods someplace else not because it actually moved but because the light it curved as they passed around them so here's the sort of basic idea right is that you map where the stars are normally in the sky when the sun's not up there and then you map them again when the Sun is in the sky and because of the massiveness of the earth and passing near at the light passing near its edge it would look like that star had moved there's one problem with this experiment that you might guess try to do this experiment on like the midday right are you gonna see starlight right near the edge of the Sun right this is one of these donut don't try it at home experiments the only time this is gonna work is when you get a perfect match of the moon blocking out the bright photosphere of the Sun so it turns out Einstein predicted this and then in 1919 a team of astronomers led by Arthur Eddington tested this did the experiment and confirmed Einstein's general theory of relativity this has been confirmed many times in fact when when I when I saw the Eclipse here summer before last over some that NASA astronomers still testing this but this was a hugely consequential discovery that led to the confirmation of one of the most important theories of the 20th century and it was made possible because a perfect eclipse so a set of conditions that makes the earth habitable to life that allows us to exist then sets up conditions that make it better for a key type of scientific discovery and we're able to make it here much better than we could have in other less habitable places you get the basic idea that's just one example one more brief example I mentioned that we are in a galaxy called the Milky Way galaxy and so if you are ever to go up in the mountains somewhere in fact Jonathan went and iured her childhood friends who's also a fellow discovery here in Dallas and he and I went to a camp for years in New Mexico as kids called Camp Blue Haven that's about it's over 7,000 feet above sea level and so I from Amarillo and when I would always go to camp blue haven at night I would think there's always this weird misty cloud in the sky at night I can't account for the sight that was so strange and it wasn't until several years later when I was older that I found it oh actually that's light from the Milky Way disc what we're doing is we're looking edge-on in toward the center of the Milky Way and so we're looking through this kind of density of the gas in the dust and the stars the Milky Way and so if you get up in a really high elevation you'll see that it's why it's called the Milky Way but the Milky Way is this flattened spiraled disc of gas and dust and stars and we're in it or one one small member of that and for a long time astronomers just assumed well you know wherever you are in the galaxy that will be fine but in the last 20 or 30 years astronomers have gotten much more impressed by the needs for the actual location even when you're in the right kind of galaxy you need to be in the right galactic location the so-called galactic habitable zone again my co-author in 2001 before he was outed as an intelligent design proponents had a co-authored a piece it was a cover story in Scientific American not an IV publication about the Galactic habitable zone and it's now a generally accepted idea is there gonna be some places in the galaxy where you're just not gonna want to look if you're trying to look for life so here's here's the kind of basic story here's a I think of this is a bird's eye view of the Milky Way if there were birds you know out of the Milky Way we're about midway between the center and the edge of the galaxy between the Perseus and Chet Sagittarius spiral arms so about 27,000 light years from the center to the edge of the galaxy now that's actually the right place to be and in fact if we are in a radically different place if we were in the inner part of the solar system or way on the outer part we wouldn't be here the reason is you get closer and closer to the center of the galaxy there's probably a giant super black hole there there are way too many stars there supernova going off there perturbing each other getting sucked up by black hole by the way is lethal if you know that you don't want this to happen and so you don't want to be too close to the center of the galaxy on the other hand you want to be somewhat close to the center of the galaxy because that's where the heavy elements build up and so you need things other than hydrogen and helium 1 for a terrestrial planet into for life all right and so if you get to the outer part of the solar system it's what's called astronomers call that metal-poor so not a lot of heavy elements and so you want to be close enough to the center of the galaxy for there to be materials for planets and stuff like that but not too close because of the kind of deadly stuff that's happening there and in the neighborhood of the center part of the galaxy so this is a technical diagram now that I've explained it to you and in layman's terms haha so you can see there's a kind of break out here of our solar system alright so then that's that's our Sun and then you notice the little kind of blueish green ring there that's the circumstellar habitable zone or the Goldilocks zone around our star but then our star our solar system itself needs to be in a good neighborhood in the galaxy about midway out between the center and the edge of the galaxy between spiral arms and rotating at about the same speed as the arms now it's not surprising for me to tell you that's where we are right because we wouldn't be here if that's not where we were what's interesting is that it turns out that's most of the places in the galaxy then aren't going to qualify so even if we're looking for extraterrestrial life elsewhere we're gonna want to look and nearby in the galactic habitable zone now that's interesting but again that's just evidence that habitable places are probably rare in the galaxy but there's this whole separate question what if you were to ask yourself okay where would you want to be if you could pick one place and you want to be able to learn about the recent past you want to be able to learn about the different types of stars you want to be able to see the other planets in your solar system you want to be able to see nearby and distant stars you want to be able to figure out the galaxy that you're in in its shape you want to be able to see distant galaxies and so the the foreground contaminants won't blind you to it you want to be able to detect the cosmic background radiation that gives evidence for a beginning and you can only pick one place where do you think it is it's in the Galactic habitable zone the one place where we are in other words the one place little neighborhood in the galaxy where life can exist is also the best place for doing astronomy and several other kinds of science now I'm going to develop this into a kind of robust argument but I want you to see why does that matter and you might think I already get it I see why it matters but again whenever our mind whenever we infer design when the design inference is triggered when you say that's a setup that didn't just happen there's usually two things that happen one it can be a highly improbable or complex event or structure but also it conforms to an independently given pattern or a meaningful pattern right that we would associate with intelligent agency so if you imagine you're a mountain climber and somebody kidnaps you and they drop you on an island somewhere at the foot of a mountain and you don't know where it is put your mountain climber you know how to do that so you just start climbing this mountain and it's quite dry and it gets drier and colder and you get up to the top it turns out this massive mountain is on an island and there's an ocean surrounding it and much to your surprise and maybe dismay when you get to the top you see these massive telescopes you're on Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii now you might be just a stupid mountain climber and a surfer or something like that but you're not gonna wonder why they put the telescopes on the top of the mountain right because of course that's what you would do if you're gonna say look if you want to observe the heavens you're gonna put the telescope in a good place for observing that's the pattern you detect intelligence there in the same way if the universe is set up and fine-tuned not only for complex life but to make discovery possible so those rare places where life exists or also the best places for doing science for discovering the universe around us then that suggests that the universe is not just fine-tuned for life and so this is our modest conclusion is that a universe fine-tuned the universe is fine-tuned so that environments habitable to observers will also provide the best overall conditions for observation and discovery or to put it differently the universe is not just designed for life it's designed for discovery thank you very much [Music]

Channel: Discovery Science

Views: 56,973

Rating: 4.8809109 out of 5

Keywords: science, philosophy, biology, evolution, Darwinism, neo-Darwinism, human origins, science and faith, intelligent design, Discovery Institute, Charles Darwin, biologic institute, icons of evolution, darwin's doubt, Stephen Meyer, Jonathan Wells, Douglas, Axe, Evolution News & Views, Michael Behe, William Dembski, John West, Jay W. Richards, Darwin Day in America, Darwin's Black Box, Privileged Planet

Id: j_m9DxLJ7V0

Length: 42min 15sec (2535 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 18 2019