Transcripts For CSPAN2 After Words 20140922 : vimarsana.com

We learn that we are not central or special in any way and that idea has propagated through the century and it is really at the core of modern sciences. Its become known as common mediocrity. There is nothing special or interesting about it in any way. Host this is a complex complex to tweak his ear. That we had here. Guest it is the complex that tends to make us feel special unless we are extremely downbeat in and attend to wake up in the morning but rationally we know that it doesnt overheat succeeded in that idea so really we have a battle going on in our heads i think in scientists had this andsign ends has that as well. But on the one hand, rationally we can see that we may not be special or central to the universe in any way. But host we as humans, not as individuals . Guest as individuals come as a species and even extended to the rest of life on earth. Perhaps this would happen somewhere else. But at the same time we like to think that we are special. But the complex is dealing with all of this. Thats part of the feel of the book except exploring it in a more sophisticated analytical way what it would mean to have this copernicus complex and how might it hinder or help us do science. Host the premise of the book is we are special or we are not special or we are a happy medium in between or we are both sort of unique and we are also cosmically ordinary. Guest that is the conclusion i get to at the end of the buck. I get down to a couple of things that motivate me partly the notion of telling the story of the incredible science that has happened in the last couple of decades day is moving towards the point we might actually be able to answer in real numbers the question of whether or not there is anything else out there at all like this. Whether there is other life in the universe. But at the same time, we are coming up with contradictory evidence. We have evidence of that really stands out of that worldview which is cosmic mediocrity. There are billions of other planets in the galaxy we didnt know that years ago but on the fringe of it, thats beautiful host and it started with the copernicus complex finding that we are not the center of the solar system. Guest we can trace it back to that. Of course the copernicus wasnt the first person to say that the earth might not be the center of everything. The idea goes way back to the ancient greeks. They thought that perhaps the earth was at the center of things that other greek philosophers didnt like that idea and it didnt make sense. Copernicuss reading of the scientists were doing in the middle east at the time and he understood some of the history of ancient greek science but it didnt come to him in a flash. He assembled information that was already out there. Some of the one hand we have evidence that supports that worldview that we are not central. Einsteins relativity tells us that extending there is no center to the extension. In all of david that there will be millions in the solar system weve also learned that the connect string of life come, the Building Blocks of that chemistry. There is the sort of chemical potential everywhere in the atmosphere to the chemical at the sphere. It isnt so simple. This is a big piece of the book is staffing the two sides to this vacation. The other side is that yes we found the planets and the stars, thousands of others and from that we can extrapolate that there are billions of what we are learning is the configuration of the arrangement of the planet and even the type of star that we orbit me and that we are in a slightly unusual case. The solar system is not the most frequently occurring type. Host what makes it unusual or special . Guest there is a fingerprint for the solar system in terms of the orbit of the planet into the nature of the planet itself. Planet and orbit are relatively circular paths. These are the parts that are able to compute and that we can observe in detail and they are relatively spread out and we also have a range of planetary types that the courts have liked the earth. Its like jupiter and other things. And what we have learned is that the majority are configured somewhat differently in order to attempt to be more for example they are closely packed together in the orbit is being quite spread out. The planets formation is from a and its made lots of other planets around the parent star. There are also types of planets that simply dont exist in this weather system. For example, there are planets out there that are very abundant. 60 include planets that are somewhat larger than the earth but not as large as the planets like jupiter. They might have expected that there could be such that we didnt know for sure and we didnt know other systems contained the world. And what does that all mean . We dont go to the answer to that. Host we may be in a special circumstance. Guest it is a piece of evidence that suggest there is something that is and quite as mediocre as we thought about the sources. Now, connecting that to the presence of life in the very difficult past because they dont understand the origins to really know what is necessary to put it all in place, but we are also looking at the history of life on earth and try to use that as some sort of an example is a template and as of again on the side of perhaps Something Special going on here, we look at the history of life on earth and we can see. We can talk about Bonnie Ravitz and sheep or something. For that to exist, a number of things seem to be necessary. A type of climate behavior, and certain events in the history of biology where new types of cells came into the. Host is there a sort of ingredients list with all the things that life can occur but if you take one outcome is that something that has been roughly established or conjectured . Guest if we have that magic formula that we could answer a lot of are about the existence of life elsewhere and even our own history. This is really in the book i argue that making the sort of statements are extremely dangerous. Although im talking about it now, host you like to live dangerous. Guest sometimes. 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 the meaning after the event. We could be sitting on another planet to be waiting around and having that same interview. If we didnt have six millions around the planet we wouldnt be here today. So, there is a danger in this interpretation of things after the fact. It is very intriguing but apparently a number of these are on in probable things happening across the last 4 billion years. So if you add it all up it is extremely unlikely that only after the fact that you make that. My argument in the book or one of them is that we dont actually learn much from it at all. Host you happen to be the one to catch it and that may seem an improbable, but if you purchase the wind the clock back host in a crowded baseball stadium if you are sitting there and it happens to be hit any of us would say that is incredible and you start looking back at the events that led to that point and if i hadnt picked up a seat in the stadium or showed up at this time or didnt decide to come to the game today this wouldnt have happened and it seemed very unlikely. But if you look around you and the 50,000 other people in the stadium perhaps you begin to realize it is going to end in someones hand if they get a good ball and it flies out into the crowd someone is going to catch it and that person would have had the same conversation with themselves. Host and if we had millions of planets . Guest the difference between baseball stadium and our situation in terms of looking out at this is if you are saying the baseball stadium and you dont know of anyone else that is sitting there, yet you catch the ball and if you are alone of course you cant really answer that question but if that were the time it would be incredibly unlikely. And i think a similar situation exists with the interpretation of the history of life on her into trying to extrapolate that to say things about whether or not we are very unusual has no other life in the universities in chile. Or otherwise. So, one of the themes in the book is taking that kind of argument, which has its flaws as i ive tried to discredit the baseball analogy. But at the same time you cant simply dismiss it. It could be perfect but it could be wrong and these other factors like the fact that the solar system seems to be somewhat unusual. Is that relevant for the existing life . We dont really know but we wonder and it raises a flag. One of the interesting aspects of the book isnt necessarily obvious, but. Host use begindoublequote there are but all creatures to begindoublequote yes, so they play a very important sort of role in the story. It would be an organism so small that you cant see them with your human eye. It is into a drop of water and you have to ask yourselves the r. In that situation except during the drop of water. I think thats one of the thing that made me want to write the book is realizing that some of these clues and ideas about the nature of life and whether or not it isnt just coming from astronomers and understanding planets and the abundance of other worlds that its coming from biology and the far deeper understanding of what life is on the planet what do we mean by life . There are philosophical arguments about what life is and mechanical argument that replicates and passes on in the changes it so long as over there is also a symbol or question which is if you take life on earth and give me a laundry list of what it can consist of, most of it actually the number of biodiversity consists of a single celled microorganisms bacteria. It has something to say about the significance of context i think humans and the status of the environment. Host took it considered threatened the fact that the microbial cells make up maybe not account for pound but the counting cells make up more than human cells. Its been revolutionized by beginning to understand how these microbes are not just necessary for the function. It is essential for the function and they also play the role to the cultural groups, you name it what i wanted to show in the book is take that idea which is a hot topic and an interesting topic and try to connect it through to an even broader context which is the context of all of life on earth dominated by microbes and it is these that long before we came along and maybe one or 2 billion years ago even before oxygen breathing life came along essentially the same types of single celled organisms and engineering of the planet for their own benefit to think with some conscious intent but theyve been interacting with the director the last 4 billion years. Around 4 billion years there is evidence of the living organisms on the planet. I want to make the connection that in the sense we also are being engineered by these organisms. Chemically that make up of the continental masses of the earth and chemistry of the oceans and so on. Host one of the interesting things that you point out is the microbes and bacteria formed a sort of backup for our dna. That was an interesting insight. Host this is something that i hadnt fully appreciated until a few years ago that if you look at the life that is spread over every rock and crevice in the planet there is a finite number of metabolic processes. It is the oxygen metabolism and restoration in organisms that make use of methane and extreme organisms in the compounds that they survive. But there is a finite number of these these medical schools that life on earth seems to have converged on. And the Genetic Information that describes the machinery by which you can make use of these metabolic processes seems to be highly conserved in other words its everywhere. Organisms pass it on generation to generation and micro burial often carry around at the machinery for the processes. If you flush your cell cell phone down the toilet but this doesnt matter because that wonderful picture of your cat doing something is stored somewhere else in fact in multiple properties. It does that already and its been doing it for billions of years. And the realization has been used can come along and be straight 99. 9. As long as there is a little bit of stuff left, the odds are high that they will contain still the key genetic code for the metabolism. Its tempting to think that this is what is one mechanism certainly by which life on earth has survived 4 billion years. It could be the universal rule for how life will exist for more than a thousand years on any given planet or any environment that kind of mechanism that we didnt really understand until recently. We had the picture if you cannot deny that they then thats it they are gone. Well, actually, whatever they figured out some of them are probably stuck around. All of the genetic materials, the past and microbe are spread across different species. As the negative is one way that life is sort of managed to survive for 4 billion years through the asteroid and ice ages and all of these events that could have wiped out life. Host thats right. No one suggests that life is far more tenacious than imagined years ago. They are good at surviving difficult environments for us in heat and pressure, but beyond that once it really gets going on the planet can preserve to much for complex information that it needs. Much more complex genetic details that need longterm. And i think that makes it very tempting to say this is such an obvious engineering system that if theres life anywhere else it may employ the same kind of mechanism and then perhaps it gives extra clues for how to look at life. Host if we are looking at other planets which we are and have been for a very long time. Guest if you have asked that question back in the 1960s at the dawn of the space age, even someone like karl would say we might find vegetation on mars or Something Like that. If people really do think that way, and it wasnt until host trees and stuff. Guest to some extent it is perfectly fair because they had not seen a place like mars up close enough to see that wasnt possible. In fact if you look back at when the first flight i occurred in the early space age began the chairs close up came back in or mislead is appointed and hadnt realized that it was so desolate so what has happened is the emphasis now has shifted for looking at the trees and things are looking for the chemical signatures of life it is a messy phenomena that rearranges things around itself. Is its to look for chemical signatures in recent the recent years there has been discussion it might harbor the biochemistry that we are familiar with. What are his interesting in all states but liquid water is particularly important because it is a remarkable source and biological solvent and deeply involved and integrated with the way that our biochemistry works and all these things. So follow the water is being done on track for places like nasa because that is a necessary but not sufficient. But what we would really like to look for are signs of a strange chemical imbalance that is explained by the existence of life. So for example, some people claim that they have seen atmospheric methane on mars and it shouldnt stick around for long so if you see it and somebody somebody put it there recently it could be a geophysical phenomena. It could also be methane producing bacteria somewhere beneath the surface of mars. We dont know yet. The evidence right now suggests there wasnt much methane after all. Its that kind of thing that gets people like me very excited something is out of equilibrium and strange. It is a phenomena or at least it is a dynamic phenomena on the board between order and disorder. Host so we are looking for a sort of chemicals i signs that were on the border. Guest its also been applied to the xo planets and that is a big focus. We cant quite do it get for the planets the size of earth that you can achieve looking at the chemical balance in the atmosphere but the hope is that in a few years time there will be interpreted to instruments that will come through the distance possibly earthlike planet and look for signs of the chemical equilibrium and oxygen and methane and things like that. Host pay. We are going to take a quick break and we will be back. Host in the buck you talk about the potential of actually measuring the probability that life exists elsewhere. And i thought that was a fascinating idea. Most of us think of just looking for. So, could you talk a little bit about how we might actually measure that . Guest it is a very ambitious concept. If we begin to protect life on the planet i think the ultimate step is to establish how frequently it occurs and how can we do that. While, it may be very, very difficult and i talk about this to some extent in the book. It means taking the chemical measurements of the composition of the planetary atmosphere and learning how to pin down the chemical signature that really gives you evidence and of colors that you see on the surface of the planets planet might be closely related to whether or not something is growing. There are a number of techs that would give you a probabilistic measurement of whether theres life on there is life on a planet and how much there might be. Host so you take the individual planet andsign this kind of thing . Guest you create the kind of thing we dont think of the planet for the number of factors that go with chemicals and to do with variations in the climate during the given annual cycle of the planet and so on. Things that we measure that we dont normally look at them in that respect. We know that life on earth was bringing together to formulate a grading system if you will. One of the interesting things is that the focus has naturally been just finding out whether or not theres anything else out there and that is completely reasonable. But what is the next step, what is the ultimate place that you can go to. The reason that i discussed this in the book is that it is closely related to something even deeper and that is the question of why and how exactly is this universe fit for life . It isnt suitable for life in at least one place here but how suitable is that overall. The universe we can observe for which life has traveled to 14 billion years to be the observable universe is finite. It contains a few billion gallons that may contain a couple hundred billion but its a finite number of places where life might occur. That means that the observable universe contains finite amounts of life. It might just be one instance. But the chances are that it is something between one and a very much larger number. But why is it that number . If it is just us, why . It is one looking living planet is one of the arguments i try to make in the book is that detouring that could be important not just for evaluating some statistical numerical way of true soup cans putting the number to it but also as the deeper physics. And this really goes back to the ideas that have been discussed in the past for example as an anthropic principle this came up in a middle of the 20th century that started trying to understand the nature of the universe what was quite clear at that the time the universe was finite and age or whether it had always been here said it is the same in time and space everywhere. It wasnt a big bang. Obviously there was a big bang. It was the starting point for the universe. But we begin to see that well, there are certain prophecies and the actors. This absolute strength of gratitude and electromagnetic forces committees fundamental properties and constance is a miniature that if you altered any of them a little bit, the universe could be very different but then you have to begin to ask and this almost sounds like the baseball problem again, how likely is it for the universe to end up with all the right features that would lead to the organisms like us. This can its been a kid was intimately related with the beginnings of what we now call the idea of the multiverse, the idea that there might not just be one universe like this, but a number of universes. There is no evidence for this right now but it fits with the cosmology that the interesting thing about it is that it has this nagging question of why if there is only one universe and there has only been one universe, why is it suitable for life to emerge to make that observation . And equally you can use effective the existence to perhaps understand something about the deeper physics of the universe three at the very simple level you might say is that it is made of carbonbased molecules and that comes from the massive enough stars to diffuse the alliance to make things like carbon. You might not make enough carbon to ensure there might be a planet somewhere with lots of carbon compounds out of with the life might emerge and some people have argued the anthropic principle as a bit of bad choices because it need needs not be human. It could be any life but its the existence of telling you something at the deeper physics of the universe. Host you can figure out the chemistry of whats out there to get get a rise with the rides with the chemistry and biology that we see and then vice versa. Host this has been the idea. I think in the book i try to this is interesting and an intriguing idea but its rather militant because it doesnt tell you how much life there should be. You only need one instance of life to be able to make those sort of arguments. If the physics were not a certain way, great. But what is determining how much life . Perhaps that is a clue to something beyond what we thought about in the physics at the moment into something deeper still . Said so that is one of the motivations for learning the abundance he of life is in this universe. In the book i talk about how i might do that and i go off over the details of whats what would be an extraordinary technological achievement. Host does this have to do with the calculation of uncertainty cracks i thought that your discussion was fabulous in the book because i am no mathematician but i thought you did a great job at explaining this. Guest part of the book is the way that we deal with the limited information. Host thats what we have here is limited information. Guest these days we co. These days we rely in general very heavily on a set of the mathematical theorem that comes from the mathematician back in the 18 hundreds and the fear him. Theory is all about laying out the evidence with fear he and asking not so much is my theory correct but how probable is it that my theory is correct given the observation that ive made. And in the book i use a little tail just to give an inkling of how this works. And it is often a baby chicken going to turn into a rooster. It hatches oneday and seems this thing in the sky and watches the sun moved through the sky during the course of its first days in the portal and the sunset. It thinks it isnt going to come back again. And because it is a really intelligent chicken that formulates a little theory that says i think there is a 50 50 chance that we appear. That is my theory. We will wait and see what happens. And of course the next morning the sun comes up again. Another piece of the data into and the sun sets again. So now they can update their theory a little bit. Okay. Im going to change the odds of that coming back again and instead of being 50 50 im going to say some will reappear. Of course it does and so after a while after i think a month or so it has a 99 confidence that it will reappear and every day to modify it doesnt know for sure but its 99 sure that it can start and that approached asking the scientific questions as to the basic theorem and the modern science and the interesting thing about it is to ask the kind of questions about, for example, and again i discussed this in the book, we do have a piece of evidence into the question of whether or not life is in the universe that we are here and we have one data point that most scientists have one data point that used to think they useless and they are actually right. But the interesting thing is intuition as im walking down the street and i dont into someone, what do you do im interested in life and the universe and often times people will say well we are here in a really big universe and we know there are billions of planets everywhere surely there has to be life somewhere else. It makes sense, right . Well, not really. If you apply this way of looking at things into the idea that probability and inference and updating your theory with data it turns out that you might have this theory that life on earth started pretty quickly 4 billion years ago. A few billion years later a longterm organism capable of making that observation. Doesnt that tell us something about how likely it is to arise elsewhere . And the answer is that it actually tells you nothing about the likelihood of life elsewhere. And in the book i used this to emphasize the point that right now if we could discover one single instance of life as an independent origin it would change everything. It wouldnt just be yes but it would actually change the numbers and in this case it would narrow the option much more than the chicken and the sun and it would give you a much stronger likelihood of the enormous abundance of life in the universe if you run the math properly. If you write out the probabilistic formula. Host what is the attempt so far to gather this needed data for two scan the sky and think about the signal in the book and various other way is . How might we go about getting this information . Guest there are those that we talked about already the chemical signature of purchase. That is a very practical approach and in principle you can begin to eliminate certain environments we are very thorough and we dont find anything. Thats important and that will tell us something. There is another way to do this but you alluded to. It was perhaps some people consider it the best example ever of a possibly artificial signal rising from somewhere else out there for the rest of the universe that happened. It was for the extra terrestrial Intelligence Service was a project known as setting the search for x. Or terrestrial intelligence thats been going on for a number of decades now. Originally it was for radio signals and the idea that you stand the sky is as much as you can in a different radio frequencies and as much of the time as you can looking for signals that do not appear to be natural. In other words they are not signals that are coming from the stars or galaxies were anything but some structures of the kind of things that we might send out into the universe either intentionally or im in generally. These days it is still an effort that is ongoing but its difficult for them to raise money. Its kind of the ultimate longshot. If you succeed host usa wow. [laughter] guest exactly. But as the years go by and people say why are you doing this, do you really expect to see something, i support the effort because it is one of those things that you dont know. We simply dont know. If nobody is listening, you will never find out. It may be extremely difficult to detect something that again if you dont try, you have absolutely no idea. If you try at least you have a slim chance. These days there is attention being paid to other forms of the for example, the thing called optical setting. The radio waves propagating into space may not be the best way to send signals across to other civilizations were to pick up the random civilizations as they tend to get sorted by the material. Its much more code here and do distance if you have Something Like a big laser beam to focus there is an increased interest in looking for perhaps artificial signals that way. Its looking for some of the consequences of the technological civilization. Assuming into there are many assumptions extrapolating an enormous amount from our own of our own nature that the civilizations of intelligent organism builds machines and come up with ways to extract energy from the equivalent of gasoline or maybe its Nuclear Power or maybe its solar power. Maybe its electrical or chemical. A consequence of energy use is that you warn the environment and for for example if you turn on the computer, it gets warm. That is access leaking from all the things happening in the silicone chip inside your computer. It turns out that if you run the numbers a big enough civilization and perhaps bigger than we are at the moment on a planet it would generate a significant signature unintentionally even if it is more efficient in its energy. Energy is never destroyed that is just transferred. Its hard to get rid of this waste energy. So some people have been talking about can you build a telescope specifically designed to look for this infrared planet. The argument is there may be a very specific heat signature of the civilization of the technological. This is a long reach. Okay. Thats the interesting thing about it is that if we take this question really seriously it is actually the kind of thing that we should be doing and should be thinking about. So, to come back to the earlier question about how are we going to evaluate our true significant universe, while it is going to be a technological achievement rather than a philosophical one. Host when you concluded the book with a certain distinction of uniqueness and significance and can you explain this sort of line you are walking at the end when you tell readers what to think about all this . Guest i think im pretty honest in the book about saying look this is my personal take. I try to put together all these different threads. What do i think if the answer coming and part of helps me get to the conclusion is that i also talk about how life is a phenomena on the edge between order and chaos. It seems to emerge where there is a bit of energy but not too much energy and there are certain chemicals but not too many chemicals or too few chemicals. It is an emergent phenomenon which is a hard topic these days talk about emergence. It is the idea that a set of simple or interacting things can somehow give rise to the great complexities like watching a flock of words flying around. They may be flying around in parts but when you see the swooping flock of birds in the sky it takes on a different structure of the emergent phenomenon and i think that this the key piece of trying to pull peace together. So i give the reader of the book that the idea to reconcile the pieces of evidence that dont quite fit together is to say that we may be unique but not exceptional. In other words, life on earth including us may be unlike anywhere else in the universe. But they may also be other places that are equally unique. The pathway through life on earth earth for 4 billion years with twists and turns. The idea that you would end up with anything like us or the creatures around us today, again, somewhere in the universe seems very unlikely. Very low probability. But the probability to end up with anything seems good. But this is the bit that is equipment and we may not have enough information attempting to think that there is a planet full of occupied out there for the example. They use coconut shells and theyve been around for a long time. They are good survivors. There may be something stranger out there. Host as a Scientific American mind i have to ask you live your life as a cosmology you are constantly thinking it. So, i wonder about that. Because people who suffer Mental Illness pr always looking inward, thinking about themselves and i wonder if there is a sort of mental homes value and having a broader use because the significance of being very important to us but sometimes we pay ourselves too much attention and almost seeing that it is more of us are just out there thinking about the planet, the solar of the solar system for the universe. It may actually give some perspective and i wonder what you thought about that. Host i would like to say that im a shining example of the rational, but im not sure. [laughter] but i think that for me personally, absolutely. On the occasions when i pause and think about it. For the sense of insignificance all add up to this package is kind of comforting but i think that it actually makes you feel that theres this extraordinarily wonderful situation and there is so much now yes im utterly insignificant, but im sitting here thinking about it and there is something that there is Something Special about that ability. So there is an extraordinary juxtaposition. But we are capable of acknowledging this. Host and if youre insignificant, then maybe the problem is also insignificant in the scheme of things. Guest right and the annoying bostons insignificant and so forth and so on. Obviously it is hard to when you have to pay the bills. Host you cant always be thinking about the universe. Guest to me it is a very soothing idea of all of this in the scheme. Host you have written an absolutely beautiful book. I was impressed by both answering these questions and the writing itself. Guest thank you very much. Its been a pleasure to talk with you. That was after words, booktv Signature Program in which authors of the latest books are interviewed by journalists, Public Policy makers and others familiar with their material. A after words airs every weekend on booktv at 10 p. M. On saturday, 12 and 9 p. M. On sunday coming into of 12 a. M. On monday. And you can also watch after words online. Go to booktv. Org and click on after words in the booktv is and topics list on the upper right side of the page. A former danish radical radical islamists who talks about his experiences as a member of al qaeda in his later life as a double agent employed by u. S. , british and danish intelligence agencies. This is about an hour and a half. I will be brief. But as you know as we follow the media even in these days the rising concern about young men going to the middle east. Converting either to the extremist causes or to the solution of returning into neither case perhaps resulting in their becoming a problem in the west when they return to the west