When people experience inequality, they experience it as like a personal problem that they individually need to fix rather than a social problem that needs to be solved together. So if we could achieve this fundamental shift and outlook so that people didnt think where they ended up with solely just from their own actions but actually were so heavily influenced by all the social forces that are around them that would change the world. That would lead people to demand policies that provide security for families and if we did that i think we would all worry less than three more. [applause] and with that and a huge, huge applause and congratulations for such work to mary anne this meeting of the Commonwealth Club and forum is adjourned. Thank you. Host hello dr. Caleb scharf its wonderful here to have you. I found your book fascinating and a terrific read and im thrilled to be here. The great thing is i get to about get to ask you about some Big Questions that most people would not dare to answer and thats the real fundamental thought. So your book is called the copernicus complex. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about what that is. Guest absolutely. The copernicus complex is really a phrase thats trying to capture one of the aspects of what i think is perhaps the biggest questions can ask and sometimes we ask it nonscientific way. The book is really about the scientific question of whether or not we are alone in the universe. The copernicus complex refers to way we feel about ourselves. On the one hand, from copernicus we wrote that we are not central, we are not special in any way and that idea has propagated through the centuries and is really driven a lot of modern science. It is really the core of modern science and idea that has become known as cosmic mediocrity. Its nothing special or interesting about it. Host this is a complex we carry around. Guest the complex is that instinct tends to make us feel special to all of us as humans unless we are extremely downbeat and tend to wake up in the morning and think that the world revolves around us but rationally we know it doesnt. Copernicus gave us that idea and so we really have this little battle going on in our heads i think and i think scientists have the sense science has it as well that on the one hand rationally we can see that it may not be special or central to the universe. Host we as humans . Guest certainly as individuals and the species and extended to the rest of life on earth. Think about it and say look perhaps this happens somewhere else. But at the same time we like to think its special. Thats just built into it so the complex is dealing with all of this is really part of it. Thats part of the theme of the book except exploring it in a more sophisticated analytical way. What does it really mean this copernicus complex and how might it hinder or help us decides . Host the premise of the book is sort of we are special or we are not special or some happy medium in between or are we are both sorted unique and we are also changing . Guest that is actually really the conclusion i get to in the book. When i set out to write the book there were a couple of things that molded motivated me. Part of it was telling the story above incredible signs that this happened in really the last couple of decades that is moving us toward a point where we might be able to answer in real numbers this question of whether or not theres anything out there at all like this and other life in the universe. But at the same time we are coming up with contradictory evidence. We have evidence that really stands out of the copernicus worldview which is mediocrity. We cant know if there are billions of other planets in our galaxy. On the face of it that is a beautiful thing. Host in this started with the copernicus binding that we are not the center of the solar system. Guest i think you can trace it back to that and of course copernicus was actually the first person to say that the earth might not be the center of everything. It might take us back to the ancient greeks, aristotle thought that the earth was at the center of things and other greek philosophers like that idea. It wasnt logical how that could possibly be so it took a long time for copernicus to come along. Copernicus was reading what scientists were doing in the middle east at the time and he too understood some of the history of ancient greek science. It didnt come to him in a flash i think an assembled information that was already out there. So this idea on the one hand the supports that copernican worldview. We are absolutely not central. Einstein tells us that in an expanding universe there is no center to that expansion. Its kind of the ultimate extension of the copernican principle but we also have found evidence that there will be billions of planets in our galaxy beyond those in the solar system. We have learned that the carbon chemistry, the Building Blocks are everywhere. Carbonbased molecules throughout space. Host the chemical potential for life is everywhere our chemical atmosphere is special or unique. Guest it seems that way so there is a host of evidence that supports this notion of positive mediocrity but theres also a host of evidence that might suggest its not so simple. This is really a big piece of the book is stressing these two sides to of the equation. The other side to the equation is that yes we found new planets and stars, thousands at this point and from that we can extrapolate that there are billions but the configuration of our solar system and the arrangements of the planets and types of planets and even the types of stars in the orbit mean that we are slightly unusual case. The solar system is not the most frequently occurring type of place. Host what makes it unusual or special . Guest theres a fingerprint in terms of the orbits and the planets related to the planets themselves. Planets the planets are relatively a circular path. There was a path that newton was able to compute in that we can observe in detail in their relatively spread out. We also have a range of planetary types called small rocky planets like the earth or gas giant planets like jupiter and places like neptune and what we have learned is that the majority of planetary systems are configured somewhat differently. Orbits tend to be less circulate more elliptical for example. The orbit is quite spread out as if planet formation run a muck and the system made lots of planets and they are clustered around the parent star like bugs around a pot of honey or something. There are also types of planets that simply dont exist in our solar system. For example there are planets out there which are very abundant. 60 of the solar system include planets called super earth. They are somewhat larger than the earth but not as large as the planet like jupiter. They might have expected there could be such things but we didnt know for sure and we didnt know that most other systems contain one of those worlds. And what does that all mean for life . Thats a big question. We dont know the answer to that. Host shows a little bit that we are unique and we may be in a special circumstance. Guest is ones piece of evidence that suggests that you know there is something not quite as mediocre as we thought about our solar system. Connecting that to the presence of life is a very difficult ta task. The origins of life and really what is necessary to put it all in place but we can also look at the history of life on earth and try to use that as some sort of am example or template so again on the side of Something Special going on we look at the history of life on earth, you can see that there are a number of things that have to line up in order for complex life, not necessarily us that we could be talking about bunny rabbits or sheep, complex history of life. For that to exist a number of things have to be necessary to do certain type of environment and climate behavior and certain events in deep history of biology where new types of cells tend to be complex cells for example. Host have these i have these things than spelledout . Is there a list, an Ingredient List like check, check and you get all these names and then i can occur . If you take one out, is this something that is roughly established or conjectured . Guest i would say not really. This is shooting in the dark a little bit. If we had that magic formula you need this, you need this, you need this you would get life and we could answer a lot more abo about. Existing life elsewhere and even in our own history. In the book i argue that making these types of statements are extremely dangerous. In the book i really go into the detail. Life is dangerous and planets are dangerous. In the universe is a dangerous place. You have to go with the flow. Part of the difficulty is that these are all things that take on meaning after the event. So part of the argument i make in the book is we could be sitting on another planet in different history and i could have tentacles and id be waving them around in my purple scaled skin and having the same interview somewhere and saying yes you know if we hadnt had six months around our planet we wouldnt be here today. So theres a danger in this interpretation of things afterthefact. One of the arguments i make in the book is these things are very intriguing. It is intriguing that apparently our existence of complex life is contingent on a number of their improbable things happening across the last 4 billion years. If you add it all up its extremely unlikely but its only afterthefact that you make that inference. My argument in the book are one of the arguments is we dont actually learn much from us at all. Host you make the analogy of a baseball flying up into the stadium and you being, happen to be the one to catch it. Guest thats right. Host that seeming improbable but if you are to sort of wind the clock back that could have landed in someone elses hands and you know was going to land somewhere. Guest exactly. If you are sitting there i think any of us would say thats incredible and you start looking back at the events that led to that. If i hadnt picked up his seat in the stadium and if i hadnt shown up at this time were decided to come to the game today this wouldnt have happened. All seems very unlikely but if you look around you in d. C. 50,000dollar people in the stadium he began to realize its going to land in someones hand. Someone hits a good ball and applies into the crowd someone is going to catch it. That person would have had the same conversation. Host and if we had millions of planets . Guest now the difference between the baseball stadium in our situation in terms of the universe is its as if you were sitting in the baseball stadium and he dont know anyone else is sitting there. If you dont know you have to ask am i the only one that caught the ball and he cant really answer that question. If that were the case he would be incredibly unlikely. I think a similar situation exists with any interpretation of the history of life on earth and trying to extrapolate that to say things about whether or not we are very unusual. Theres no other life in the universe is essentially or otherwise. So one of the themes in the book is taking that kind of argument which has its flaws as i describe what the baseball analogy, but at the same time you cant totally dismissive. It could be correct but it could be wrong. We dont know and these other factors like the fact that our solar system seems to be somewhat unusual. For example we dont orbit the most common type of star but is that relevant for the existence of life . We dont really know but it raises a flag. Host one of a very interesting aspects of the book which is not necessarily obvious is that you spend a lot of time talking about microbes. In fact he began the book with the dutch scientist who discovered for the first time that there are actually Little Creatures that are in our saliva and you begin the book with this. So microbes play a very Important Role in this story. Could you talk a little bit about that . Guest sure. As you say i begin the book in this moment where perhaps the First Time Ever a human sees into a drop of water and realizes the organisms are so small that they cant see them with your human eye greedy can even see them with a magnifying glass. There are powerful optical instrument to appear even into the cosmos really looking into buying the cosmos in a drop of water. You have to ask yourself are we in that situation except we arent a glass of water. One of the things that made me want to write the book was realizing that some of these clues, some of these ideas about the nature of life are not just coming from astronomers and scientists and understanding planets in the abundance of the world but is coming from biology. There are philosophical arguments about what life is and mechanical arguments about something that replicates and changes and so on but theres also a similar question which is if you take life on earth, give me a laundry list of what is a consist of . Most of it in terms of number, biomass genetic diversity and single celled microorganisms significant complex life, humans and our status in a planetary system, planetary environment. We talk about humans. Host you could consider it threatening if you think about it. The fact that microbial cells are less than, maybe not pound for pound but if youre counting cells make up less than human cells. Guest thats right. We carry around more single celled celled microbes than our own cell numbers which is an extraordinary thing. Obviously the field of microbiology revolutionized by getting to understand how these microbes are not just necessary for function as large multicellular organisms but they also play a role in making us who we are. Individuals and cultural groups, you name it. So what i wanted to show in the book was i would take that idea to human microbes which is in hot pocket hot topic and try to connect into the broader context which is the context of all of life on earth dominated by microbes and these microbes that long before we came along and long before multicellular life came along maybe one or 2 billion years ago even before oxygen breathing life came along, essentially the same types of single celled organisms planet for their own benefit not some conscious intent, but they have been interacting with the planetary environment for the last 4 billion years give or take. We dont know exactly when life began although it looks like it began pretty early. It was formed some 4. 5 billion years ago and certainly around 4 billion years theres evidence of living organisms on the planet. So to make the connection that in a sense we also are being engineered by the organism, the same organisms that have been engineering Everything Else on the planet chemically, the makeup of the continental masses of the earth and the chemistry of the ocean are interlinked with life. Host one of the other interesting things they point out is that microbes and bacteria, algae form sorted a backup for our dna. That was a very interesting insight. Guest this is something i hadnt fully appreciated until a few years ago that if you look at life and not just in us but spread over every rock and crevice on the planet theres a far number of metabolic processes and how you extract energy and raw materials. We breathed oxygen for example and oxygen make metabolism and respiration. Organisms make use of methane. They generate methane or use methane. These organisms using ion and manganese compounds, thats how they survive. But finite number of these metabolic tools of life on earth has converged on 10 of them. The interesting thing is the Genetic Information that describe machinery for which you make use of any metabolic process is highly conserved. In other words its everywhere. Organisms obviously passed down from generation to generation but microbes might might koberger microbial carry around the data that isnt necessarily his. It looks like a giant distributed system the ultimate system where if you take a picture on your cell phone in immediately uploaded to several places and you flush your cell phone down the toilet it doesnt matter. The cat pictures are distorted in fact its stored in multiple copies. It looks like microbial does that and its been doing that for millions of years. The realization being that you could come along and destroyed 99. 9 of life on the planet tomorrow, if you could do that. The odds are extremely high the microwill contain this pregenetic code from metaboli metabolism. In other words what life is learned over the 4 billion yea years, this is one mechanism by which life on earth for 4 billion years because once its found the two solutions to how you survived, holds onto them tight, holds onto them tied in a very robust way, informational way. And that has the hallmarks of something that could be more general. His universal rule, how life entered more than a thousand years and is back on the mechanism which we really didnt understand until recently. We have more of a picture of well if you kill off all the dinosaurs, thats it, they are gone but actually microbes in dinosaurs whatever they figured out, some of them are probably still around. All of the genetic material is still around pass from microto microbes and spread across. Was that is one way that life has managed to survive for 4 billion years through ice ages and all the events that could have wiped out life. Guest thats right, yeah. Its a number things. One suggests that life is far more tenacious than imagined a few years ago. Certain organisms are extremely good at surviving difficult environments for us. Environments with heat or pressure but beyond that life, once it really is on the planet can preserve much more complex information and detailed information longterm. I think that makes it tempting to say well this is such an obvious engineering system that if theres life anywhere else it may employ the same kind of mechanism to say look perhaps i can get extra clues for how to look for that life. Host if we are looking for life on other planets, which i guess we are and have been for a very long time, what exactly are we looking for . Guest well its a good question and i think you could have asked that question back in the 1950s at the dawn of the space age they might say we might find vegetation on mars or Something Like that. People really did feel that way and it wasnt until. Host trees and stuff. Guest absolutely. Its perfectly fair because they had not seen a place like mars up close enough to realize that was impossible. In fact if you look back at when the first flyby of mars occurred in the early space age and images closeup from mars came back enormously disappointing. We hadnt realized that it was a desert like and desolate. So what has happened is the emphasis now has shifted less than looking for trees are sheep wandering around or anything really obvious that looking for the chemicals that indicate life. Life is a messy phenomenon. It rearranges things around itself. Chemicals that takes them in chemicals that alters, it chemical balance in the environment among other things but one of the key approaches these days i