What are the odds there is life in outer space - Richard Dawkins asks Neil Degrasse tyson

[Music] what do you think are the odds that there is life elsewhere it must be high and I'll tell you why people say what have you found life yet no well no that's like going to the ocean this has been said before taking a cup of water scooping optin say there are no whales in the ocean here's my data you know you get a slightly bigger sample and so if you look at for example what we call the radio bubble this is the sphere around Earth centered on earth which is the farthest our radio signals have reached in the galaxy and they're about 70 light-years away we've been transmitting radio signals being advertently leaking into space for about 70 years 70 light year radius sphere well how big is the galaxy will shrink that sphere down to maybe the size of a BB and then the galaxies on that scale would be the size of this stage that's how far our radio signals have traveled and those aren't even ones we sent on purpose the ones we sent on purpose have traveled much less so no we haven't actually reached as far into the galaxy as we'd like before we would say definitively that there's no one intelligent living today but here's some very simple facts I can review them in 90 seconds you look at the formation of the earth and the earliest sign of fossil life subtract a few hundred million years at the beginning of Earth when earth was a shooting gallery earth was still accreting the the birth materials of a solar system it's hostile to complex chemistry over that time not fair to start the clock then wait a couple hundred million years now start the clock and wait around and see when you have the first signs of single-celled life at most four hundred million years at most birth has been around for four and a half billion so earth without any help from us with basic ingredients throughout the universe managed to create life simple though it was so an earth one of you know eight planets get over it what one of earth an ordinary star to suggest and and what are the ingredients of life the number one atom in your body is hydrogen number two atom is oxygen together making mostly water that's in you next is carbon in this order next is nitrogen next is other stuff my favorite element other yeah you look at the universe the number one element to the universe is hydrogen next is helium chemically inert couldn't do anything with it anyway next is carbon thing I let that oxygen there next is oxygen next is nitrogen one-for-one we're not even made of odd things the most common things in the universe are found here on earth and we're made of them and carbon one of the most chemically fertile the most chemically fertile element on the periodic table it's not a surprise for carbon-based life is just the extreme expression of complex chemistry so that's what life that's what biology is so all these people who want to imagine imagine because they remembered the chemistry class that that silicon sits right below carbon on the periodic table so it bonds similarly to carbon so they want to imagine silicon-based life I'm saying okay fine but you don't have to this five times as much carbon in the universe as silicon there's no need to even have to go there we got enough to imagine just simply with the carbon atom at the center of these of these huge biological molecules point is it happened relatively quickly with the most common ingredients in the universe - now say life on Earth is unique in the universe would be inexcusably egocentric yeah I agree with that [Laughter] and I would go further and say that if ever you meet somebody who wishes to claim that he believes so she believes that life is unique in the universe then it would follow from that belief that the origin of life on this planet would have to be a quite stupefyingly rare and improbable event and that would have the rather odd consequence that when chemists try to work out theories models of the origin of life they what they should be looking for is a stupendously improbable theory an implausible theory if there was a plausible theory of the origin of life you can read it that's right because because it would happen because then life would have to be everywhere everywhere now maybe it maybe it is everywhere my my hunch yes I did there's lots and lots of life in the universe but it's probably because the universe is so vast the islands of life that there are are so spaced out that it's unlikely that any one of them would ever meet any other which is rather sad it's sad however let me make you happy a little bit more from that we've learned now that we can model the formation of the solar system in this period of time where Earth was being bombarded heavily that's called the period of heavy bombardment in the early universe we call it like we see it let the record show I don't know if I've ever in my life ever understood the title of a biology research paper I just want to say that just the words just I'm not feeling them you know they're too big too many syllables it's it's a I'm off topic here so that's Oh back to the period of heavy bombardment and with computer simulations you can you can model what happens when an impact hits a planetary surface and it's not much different from if you sprinkle Cheerios on a bed which you would never do on purpose but your kids would do this and then you smack the surface of the bed there's a sort of a recoiling effect and Cheerios pop upwards it turns out Mars may have been wet we know at some point it had water and fertile for life before Earth and at this period of heavy bombardment if it had started life surely it would been simple life as we there's no reason to think otherwise we've learned that bacteria can be quite hearty as you surely know so we imagine a bacterial stowaway in the nooks and crannies of one of these rocks that are cast back into space in fact if you do the calculation there's hundreds of tons of Mars rocks that should have fallen to earth by now over the history of the solar system maybe one of those rocks carried life from Mars to earth seeding life on Earth my great disappointment would be going to Mars and finding Mars life based on DNA yeah then it would not have been a separate experiment in life we would just all simply have to get over the fact that we are Martian descendants what we need is a second sample of life we have only one at present why have you only given us one it was it would be it would be a disappointment as you say if we found life on Mars based on DNA well at least if we found life on Mars based on the same DNA code should just about imagine DNA evolving twice but you couldn't imagine the the same four-letter code evolving twice so but I wanted to make a point that your calculation of it took only about 400 million years of the most for the first life to arise for the first capable of broadcasting radio waves capable of being detected elsewhere in the universe it took approximately just under four million years well know about about four billion years which is about half a life of I mean of the thing that we can expect in the solar system to so an important point by the way because we were human before we had the technology to broadcast so if your criterion for whether a planet has intelligent life and if we are the measure of intelligence then there could be plenty of planets out there with roman empire's and whatever else and they're not sending radio signals but any close enough observer would surely declare them to be intelligent the time interval between roman empire's and radio signals is negligible compared to the total time we're talking about so it's an interesting question how long it takes once you get language once you get civilization once you get culture how long does it take to get radio waves and these how long does it take to get self destructive weapons that blow the whole that's the next and your even there's an implicit assumption that you're making inadvertently possibly that intelligence is an inevitable inevitable consequence of the evolutionary record and I I'm skeptical of that because if that were the case what we call our intelligence would have happened multiple times in the fossil record at it it hasn't whereas other things have showed up plenty of times like the the sense of sight and locomotion there's rather inventive ways things can get around the world my favorite is the snake of course no arms no legs yet it gets around just fine I'm imagining a alien living visiting earth stumbling on a snake the only creature sees right and then it goes back and tells its home people you're not gonna believe when I saw there's a creature on that planet no arms no legs it can still get around it detects its prey with infrared rays and can eat things five times bigger than its end and they'll think the guy was on drugs it's an ordinary snake sitting here on our earth another objection while I'm on the subject big disappointment I have our Hollywood aliens and I don't know who to blame for this Hollywood or biologists that advise them Hollywood aliens away - and Throop amorphic for me even BTW he had a head shoulders arms okay had three fingers instead of five there's still fingers at the end of a hand he had legs he had feet that's human and look at the diversity of life on earth to draw from if you want to think about the ways of being alive I'm just so disappointed and not even that I know that I can help them but one of my favorite aliens ever was the blob did you see them no I don't see as many movies as you it's just so so that alien was a blog right that's what it was and it would just kind of move along and it would grab on to you and suck out your blood and keep moving and it was non and anthropic in concept and it came from space and I just thought that was an attempt to try to create some kind of way of being alive that's very that's a very laudable attempt it is interesting to look around the animal kingdom and count up the number of times that some things have evolved I mean I is several dozen times ears and quite a large number of times echolocation that's finding a way around by sonar only four times so that's that about whales and two different groups of birds okay and cave-dwelling birds and a few rudimentary examples in some shrews and salons but really for four different times the intelligence and language of the human kind only once as you pointed out so it can't be that important for survival and if natural selection is at work it should have shown up many more times do you think so but I mean it's it's a genuinely interesting point that I think biologists haven't thought about enough is to go around the animal kingdom counting up the number of separate arisings of something because that does tell you something about what you might expect elsewhere in the universe you'd expect eyes you might expect their co-location hypodermic syringes stingers about a couple of dozen I'm talking about independent evolutions now you look about spiders I'll burst of that where he's called guns yep about coal but our version of the hypodermic stinger would be called a gun yes okay talk about something that penetrates the body and injects poison and and that's so that's an interesting question and another relevant point is you look around the world at different island continents and say how many times have similar are they you could Australia the Australian mammals for example and there are very very powerful similarities between Australian mammals which evolved entirely independently of mammals in South America independently again of mammals in Asia and Africa and so again that gives you a kind of a clue for how predictable evolution is other worlds are going to be very different but we perhaps shouldn't write off the possibility that the Hollywood aliens are not they might not be not that unimaginative I mean my colleague Simon Conway Morris has even suggested that there is very likely that there will be if not humans at least bipedal big brained language toting hand toting forward looking eyes for stereoscopy pretty much humans he thinks it's highly likely he's got a religious agenda I'm sorry to say for that but but I like him I appreciate the power of natural selection I think that whatever I think if he were if he were a creature other than a primate he might be giving a different Lister I think that's right yep I think that's probably right the horse doesn't have two eyes facing forward but the horse damn near can see directly behind it and so the horse would be valuing that fact oh I'm not dinner I'm not denigrating horses at all I mean your first saw him that there's bias is you start listening the human features that you would want in it earlier I don't I don't want to say that I'm not picking on humans because they're superior but because they're us I mean we we have stereoscopic vision we have freedom vision horses don't they have a different kind of vision insects have a different kind of vision bats have echo I mean it's not vision but it's that it's some using sound to produce what I would guess inside the bats brain is probably perceived rather the same way we perceive visually because why wouldn't you use the tools of the brain of the mammalian brain to created to create an image to create a model of the world I've even speculated by the way that they show that in forgive me the movie daredevil do they have his lines he's blind and when it rains he likes when it rains because the rain hits people and he hears the different sort of reflections of the sound and he saw his girlfriend for the first time in the rain there's the image of okay but my speculation is that bats here in America I got them to talk to about our movies my speculation is that bats here in color because why wouldn't you use color color is just a huge perceived hue it's nothing more than a label that the brain uses precisely that's all it is Cole you attach it to some potential change so bats would would most usefully use color as a sign for example the difference between a furry moth and a leathery locust might be perceived as a red versus blue and that would be a very useful way for natural selection to have tied the labels of hue onto something that seemed very strange to us button but we're coming to the end of our of our time did we just begin if we want to have some time for questions which I'm good very much like that but it's a couple more bones to pick with you okay well good let's go quickly through those okay and just start if you start formulating questions in your head some years to actually in 1994 was it or 90s 1996 there was this rock and Antartica and meteorite discovered alh84001 which had ten tantalizing evidence by the way that rock was from Mars one of the tonnage of rocks that we know are out there and there was evidence in one of the nooks of that rock for possible life traceable not to earth but from Mars and so the evidence was very circumstantial but interesting nonetheless there were there was chemistry there that could only happen in the presence of oxygen and there's chemistry there occupying a similar spot that could happen only in the absence of oxygen now you might say well who cares well life is just such a machine when you breathe in oxygen you oxygenate the hemoglobin that oxygen gets used for your metabolism and it goes back without the oxygen in the same body you have oxygenating and deoxygenated forces operating within you so life does it for free if you don't appeal to life you'd have to have the rock hang out over here for a while and roll down a cliff and go anaerobic for a while you'd have to sort of patch it together so it was all the news page one story and they even had an electron microscope photo of what looked like an itty bitty worm it had little segments on it is intriguing that was not the lead evidence of the authors it was just kind of interesting it was about one-tenth the size of like the smallest worms on earth but interesting nonetheless I'm invited to comment on this in fact it was Charlie Rose he had four people I'm the astrophysicist they had a biologist they had a philosopher and the picture of the worm comes up the biologist was piped in by screen said that can't possibly be life so I said Bob what if I miss it so tell me sir why I think it oh because the smallest life on Earth is ten times that size and I'm still waiting to him to give me the reason why he can't be life then I paused and reflected at that well that is the reason he's giving me that it can't be life his comparison with life on Earth and then I said last I checked we're talking about a rock form or why are you using earth to constrain your capacity to think about what exists out there my question to you our biologists close minded or open-minded about what is possible in terms of biology in this universe because at the end of the day you go behind closed doors and you confess to yourselves you only have a data sample of one because all life on Earth has common DNA yeah well he missed me at most any other Sciences we would say that's not how do you make science he was being closed-minded no no question about it because he was using his experience and life on this on this planet to make that generalization on the other hand one could make such a statement on by using the laws of physics and you could say that there are certain things that that wouldn't work for physical reasons I mean I'm not saying that a tiny worm wouldn't work for physical reasons but I could imagine somebody making an argument that said you you you cannot have for example maybe there's a certain minimum size of AI that could form an image for purely physical reasons and that would be a good reason why I'm there all the way just had he sighted earth as his measure of what is possible but he was just wrong okay you don't you don't know align yourself with that was the biggest thing I have to get off my chest here okay shall we and bring up the lights and see if there are there are there microphones in the aisles apparently so if you just line up in the two Center aisles behind those microphones and I guess we can pick left and right for what questions you might have professor Dawkins so we're very pleased to hear that you're writing a children's book on the beauty of science we'd like both of you to write one for adults or you know video special on TV because we don't want this Wonder and awe that you all have been discussing today to be co-opted by religious people in the world and it is it is really wonderful so what can we do to spread the word that science is not something to be afraid of it's something to really be in wonder of right connector slip in there you commented that the book is for there's a children's book we need one for adults indeed we need one of those for adults interestingly we probably don't need it for children because children are born inquisitors of their natural world they turn over rocks they jump in puddles they pour water down down your back they do things that are taught by you can look at it as wreaking havoc in the house we can look at it as a long series of science experiments some of them go on playfully wrong but nonetheless explorations into the natural world what happens is over time that gets beaten out of them because that is not the behavior over no beat of the sign of obedience that's the behavior of disarray and so and Plus adults far outnumber children so I think the real problem in the world is adults especially if it says they control the world I mean what what I would say about how we going to convey the wonder which you and I are both extremely interested in doing that and I'm following your mentor Carl Sagan for it for example you know I like to make a distinction between what I call the these two schools of why we should pursue the space race a space exploration the nonstick frying pan way which is which is it's useful because you get spin-offs like nonstick frying pans and it's wonderful and I go for the wonderful part and and I I find that one of the problems with with people who attempt to convey science to laypeople whether it's children or adults is they tend to be obsessed with bringing it down to earth and making it ordinary and mundane and the sort of thing you might meet in your own kitchen I prefer and I'm glad somebody's doing that but for me I prefer the wide-open spaces of space the the what the wonder of looking down a microscope at the very small and thinking about it from a sort of more from a more poetic point of view rather than from a more utilitarian point right here yes first I'd like to say thank you this is very stimulating and it's wonderful to have this year at Crampton University at Howard University Crampton auditorium at Howard University a practical application question for technology and its impact on humans specifically cellphone cellular cell phones I'm in health care and I'd like to know where you stand on the effects and I know we've come a long way since the first cell phones came out but I get particularly apprehensive when I see young people putting cell phones to the heads of little infants and saying talk to Daddy or something like that where do you see that's the my first question the impact of the waves and things like that which is out I know I've looked at some studies on human beings and then my second question is about the references for the origins of calculus in the Egyptian culture thank you okay uh given how many people are in line I think we should try to answer as quickly as to do this and I'll take a first stab and if you want to try that as well I don't know of any first efforts at calculus in the Egyptian culture perhaps Richard does and with regard to cell phone use there's some very important fact of science and that is the act of measurement it's a fascinating thing measurement because you can never measure anything precisely that is with unlimited precision you can only measure it with the uncertainties of your measuring device and all you can do in the lab is try to constrain how uncertain that measurement is but at some level would always be uncertain that here's what happens if there is if you're trying to measure a phenomenon that does not exist the variations in your measurement will occasionally give you a positive signal as well as a negative signal if that positive signal is the idea that maybe a causes B in this case cell phones cause cancer a paper gets written about that result and then people people get concerned that cell phones my course cancer or power lines my clothes cancer this goes way back so in fact if you look at the full spate of these studies even those that they thought not to publish because it was not a positive effect there are some cases where in fact there's less cancer and so these are the phenomenon of a no result when you actually have a causing be the signal is huge it is huge and it's repeatable in time and in place with cell phones that repeatable signal is yet to be emerge from the total experiments that are done on it that being said if you're worried almost every cell phone you can you know they have the cell phones on your hip and you've got in earpiece so just do that if you're worried but otherwise we I can either say the jury is still out or the experimental results are consistent with no effect at all I have nothing to add to that this one out yes yes I was interested when you were speaking about the bubble of radio waves as far as the limitation of our communication I've read recently at the Large Hadron Collider they've had some crazy experiments but there are apparently particles that are seemingly seemingly unconnected but they react to each other in symmetrical patterns of some kind I'm very amateurish on this but what do you think will be the possibility of instantaneous communication across vast distances using some kind of particle manipulation yes exactly it's exactly an example of the kind of thing I meant when I said I it's beyond me yeah so quantum physics is the physics of the world of the small and in fact quantum rules apply macroscopically but they're they don't reveal themselves as exotically as what happens with single particles and a particle can pop into existence go out of existence what we call tunnel from one place to another instantly with no time delay between the two it could exist in all places at once and then show up instantaneously here when you make the measure these are quantum rules that don't make any sense to us because we don't live in a quantum world if we did these would be phenomena that would be quite natural so now can we exploit the quantum world for faster-than-light communication is what you are suggesting here and there's no known way to do that given the laws of physics there in other words you can have it what's called a wave form a wave function of a particle and its occupant is it it's everywhere you make a measurement then the particle instantly shows up here even though the wave had a probability of existing the particle had a probability of existing over here and so it's just odd and we don't know how to exploit that fact to our advantage but as far as we know no you cannot have faster-than-light communication which we desperately need to get bigger than the bubble to talk to the rest of the galaxy again I'll try to make my answers even shorter than that yes sir making the distinction between life in the universe which i think is inevitable an intelligent life in the universe which is a question or challenge at least the probability of given our planet of being in the right location the star being the right type of star and the right location etc what what are the odds that you had and given the time it took for an app four and a half billion 4.6 million years for us to get to the point where we can ask the question is there intelligent life in the universe what do you think those odds are the universe is huge in time and in space and in contents so the good thing about the universe is extraordinarily rare phenomena happen every day someplace in the universe and so however rare we might calculate it would be up here for life as we know it you multiply up the numbers of stars in the galaxies galaxies in the universe these are staggeringly huge numbers 10 to the 21 stars a thousand times bigger than the number of grains of sand on an average beach itself a hundred times bigger than the number of words ever spoken or uttered by all humans who have ever lived these are staggeringly large stupendously large numbers to use Richards word that give us the confidence that even if intelligent life is only short-lived grows up and then it's become so smart it can kill itself that there's bound to be one out there that we're hitting it right at the right time that they are happy to have a conversation with us if we're smart enough to have a conversation with them this question is primarily for professor Dawkins I come from a family where there are two skeptics and three religious fruitcakes you can guess which side I'm on anyhow I was just wondering with your experience if you've ever found a good way to hit the fruitcakes upside the head with some rational thinking and actually get them to pay attention it would be nice to say that all we need to do is to expose them to scientific evidence and that's certainly a very important part of it it's what Neil and Ibis both trying to do unfortunately there's a certain amount of evidence that there's a certain kind of mind which is so dyed-in-the-wool wedded to a scriptural version of the world that they more or less admit in advance that that no matter what evidence comes they will refuse to budge I mean a good example my favorite example this is the geologist Kirk wise who was a young earth creationist but who knows very well all the evidence for an Old Earth from geology and he has actually said in these very words I think I wrote him approximately right if all the evidence in the universe pointed to an Old Earth I would be the first to recognize the evidence but I would still be a young earth creationist because that is what Holy Scripture tells me somebody who's actually prepared to come out and say that at least he's honest someone who actually comes out and says that is pretty much advertising himself as beyond reason he's had centered himself from the rational discussion which the rest of us are having by announcing in advance that Scripture is going to take precedence over evidence and here's a man who knows the evidence he has a PhD from Harvard in geology he knows the evidence and yet he's announced in advance so there are certain people who are unreachable but my hope is that the vast majority of people are eminently reachable and just simply haven't been exposed to the evidence which is plentiful and wonderful next question here thanks for the great job on the poetry of science I wonder if you could say just a few words both of you on the philosophy of science just read Stephen Hawking's book the grand design first page philosophy is dead and here at Howard our administration is proposing the abolition of our philosophy programs could you say a few words I have a couple of words to say about that up until early 20th century philosophers had material contributions to make to the fist to the physical sciences pretty much after quantum mechanics remember the philosopher is the would-be scientist but without a laboratory right and so what happens is the 1920s come in we learn about the expanding universe in the same decade as we learn about quantum physics each of which falls so far out of what you can deduce from your armchair that the whole community of philosophers that previously had added materially to the thinking of the physical scientist were rendered essentially obsolete at that point and I've yet to see a contribution this will get me in trouble with ball man or philosophers but I call me later and correct me if you think I miss if if I missed somebody here but philosophy has basically parted ways from the frontiers of the physical sciences when there was a day when they were one in the same Isaac Newton was a natural philosopher the word physicist didn't even exist in any important way back then so I've disappointed because there's a lot of brain power there that might have otherwise contributed mightily but today simply does not the philosophy has other it's not that there can't be other philosophical subjects there's the religious philosophy and ethical philosophy and political philosophy plenty stuff for the philosopher to do but the frontier the physical sciences does not appear to be among them even in biology I think is an interesting point that the idea of evolution by natural selection which came independently to two men two traveling natural ists in the 19th century it's a simple enough idea that any philosopher could have thought of it from the depths of an armchair anyway back to the Greeks and none of them did and I don't really understand that it seems to me to be a strange thing that it had to wait for two 19th century scientists living 200 years after Newton did something that seemed a lot more difficult well check annex a giris sorry check annex a giris first theory of evolution in pre-socratic Greeks oh well okay but natural selection is is is something that came in at 19 not just to Darwin and Wallace I mean there were a couple of other scientists who thought of it the philosopher that I really respect in the world today philosophers of science or ones who have actually taken the trouble to learn some science and there are some and they're very good clear thinkers and they do help other people to think clearly but they're they're really the same as scientists in this they're scientists who are also trained in in philosophy sure thank you both for coming um there's a group of scientists in Europe that have developed a Large Hadron Collider and they're trying to recreate the conditions of what it's been known as a Big Bang slamming anti protons and protons together to try and find a particle known as the Higgs boson which has been missed named the god particle it's a particle that gives matter mass could you guys talk about the conditions of the universe at that time will this prove anything this experiment the interesting thing about physics is that there's very little physics left to be discovered on a tabletop the way physics works is the way discoveries in physics by and large work is you need to go someplace you've never been before either in scale large small energy especially speed once you explore these extremes you are at the hairy bleeding edge between what is known and unknown in the universe so if you want to discover something you've never done before build an accelerator that hits an that's never been hit before and the early universe is our best particle accelerator we know and so now we have the very large tabletop version of the early universe large and expensive and it'll map allows us to test our ideas about what was going on and so yes it's a regime of the early universe that we have theoretical understanding of but we get to have experimental verification for it I have visited the Large Hadron Collider twice on both occasions I was more or less literally reduced to tears I was moved so much by this stupendous effort of human ingenuity human cooperation multinational and I express my attempted to express my poetic um fascination and interest in this in this in this terrific enterprise in my latest book and there was an unfortunate misprint it came out of the Large Hadron Collider [Applause] [Laughter] [Applause] I spotted the misprint and of course I left it in but alas the the publishers proofreader also spotted it she removed it I begged her on my knees to leave it in she said it was more than her job was worth it's a quick social comment the 1990s cancelled superconducting supercollider that was to be built in Texas had peak energies three times as large as the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland Congress voted to not continue its funding the project was scrapped and now the center of mass of particle physics is no longer in the United States it's in Europe now interesting to the scientists we why we'd rather it be here in America we really celebrate the fact that science continues to advance and it's just a matter of who's nation's priorities values in it and I saw that as the beginning of the end of America's leadership in this realm all right thank you so much I probably have a question which is rather mundane in this setting when one doesn't get these opportunities very often I merely thought about this the life that's been discovered at the point of seafloor spreading on earth is I assume but if I haven't heard otherwise also dna-based as is everything else we know of and my curiosity is whether there is a hypothesis or an explanation that has been in fact devised as to how DNA can have this effect over the distance of five or six thousand miles in the ocean itself between that point and the surface not miles in the ocean I mean the diameter of the earth is only you mean feet down I'm sorry five or six miles yes thank you I can give a national physicists view but I'd say you use you start off by I'm sure so these these extremophiles these are creatures that thrive under conditions that would kill the rest of us instantly under high pressure high temperature in fact at the ocean vents you're thriving at 300 degrees Fahrenheit the pressure of the water is high enough to prevent boiling but the temperature is high enough that it would cook anything else one of the great advances in exobiology was the discovery that life on Earth is harder than anyone had ever given previously given a credit we don't want to need the moon temperature of pond water to have life thrive the more we've looked in the earth the more we found life doing the backstroke under extraordinary ly hostile conditions hostile to humans that is what that has done for us astrophysically these allow us to past for life with a much wider net than we had previously thought we had available to us whereas before we would look in the habitable zone the Goldilocks zone not too close to a host star your water would evaporate not too far away water freezes you're looking for that liquid water zone made liquid by sunlight we find out all you really need as an energy source doesn't have to be the Sun Jupiter keeps Europa warm one of its moons it has a liquid oceans been liquid for billions of years you want to look for life armed with this diversity of life the hardiness of life even we find here on earth it is only broadened our search for life in the cosmos among the many theories of the origin of life recently people have started thinking about life might possibly have started under what we now think of as extreme conditions of high temperature and it could be that we are now in the cold zone which was not the way it was when it first started and that's an interesting possibility so they would look at us like we're the exact exactly they look at us as they're worthy extremophiles my department chairman to say that he wants you to go ahead and ask your question I'm not gonna tell him no so please keep it brief and it's the last one before we go into the books on thank you however making this free anyway I read a book consolation of philosophy the main guy boethius is condemned to death he has everything taken from him all he has is his reason and his sense of self not even bad but he attempts to console himself to this execution by reasoning that the world has order that there is something that keeps things together and he uses his reason to try and get to the root of why he should be a piece of death the problem is his source of origin is a belief in God what would you do well I don't know if I fully understand the question I do know that if he's about to be executed how about you are about to be executed I'm about to be executed you have nothing except your knowledge and your your knowledge of science your experience I would request that my body in death be buried not cremated so that the energy content contained within it gets returned to the earth so that flora and fauna can dine upon it just as I have dined upon flora and fauna throughout my life what about you mr. Dawkins [Applause] and I'm sorry we have to move on please another round of applause [Applause]

Channel: Cosmology Today™

Views: 1,776,245

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Keywords: Richard Dawkins vs Neil degrasse, life outer space, alien life, neil deGrasse Tyson, tyson, tyson debate, dawkins debate, intelligent alien life, SETI, Extraterrestrial, Aliens, space, Milky Way, Drake Equation, Education (Industry), outer space

Id: Uk0pRPIQBY4

Length: 43min 57sec (2637 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/ozzagahwihung]

Wow, Neil De grasse Tyson really loves to talk over people