Bunyan Lecture 1993 - Carl Sagan

thank you, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to this twelfth annual Bunyon

lecture

and by President Petrosyan of the astronomy program at Stanford, who sponsored this

lecture

series, these lectures and some other activities of the astronomy program at Stanford feature with the support of a donation from the state. Sir. James T Bunyan, a former employee of Stanford University, Mr. Banyon, a factory of modest means, left his life to save us. He is also a philosophy student with a great interest in the evolution and origin of the universe and the evolution of life in the universe, and he requested that we hold this conference with the main purpose of being, and I quote: exploring the philosophical implications of scientific disciplines such as astronomy, astrophysics, geology, biology and present a coherent and reasonable explanation of the structure and inner workings of the cosmos, as well as the dawn of life, the smell of man and the state of the human spirit in The scheme of things is a difficult task, well, my colleagues and I in the program started fully agree on the importance of these issues and we are grateful for Mr.

Bunny's contribution, which has allowed us during the last Twelve years have distinguished the speakers who came to Stanford to share with us, in fact, for a general audience, to share with the general audience, the latest findings in astronomy, there have been many very exciting findings. and explore with us the meanings of these findings and their importance to humanity, as I said, in fact it has been a very exciting time in astronomy, especially in the last few decades, not a year goes by without a new discovery being made that changes completely. our understanding of the universe is also an exciting time at Stanford in this field of astronomy, as we are in the midst of a modest expansion, we hope to increase the number of faculty, but in the next few years we have also just become members. of a consortium of universities to build their 10 meter telescope which, when it is actually finished, will be the largest telescope of the year and, in fact, on Earth or I wouldn't say the universe is probably still in the universe, but who knows In fact, it will be a little bigger. than the 10-meter Keck telescope just completed by the University of California and Caltech atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

Well, without saying much more, let me say that we are very fortunate and it is a great privilege for us to have a Carl Sagan professor from Cornell. It was agreed that the university will give the lectures this year, so at this time I would like to ask Professor Wagner from the astronomy department who only asked the program and physics department to come and introduce our speaker, thank you bye, in a moment when the need for rationality. The dialogue about the nature and implications of science has reached a critical level. We here today and the global community are fortunate to have Karl with us.

I am struck by the extent to which the focus and profound effects of much of Karl's efforts coincide with Mister Bunion's goals. Which has just been elucidated two years after receiving his doctorate in astronomy and astrophysics from the University of Chicago. Karl established his first association with Stanford as a visiting assistant professor of genetics at the School of Medicine in the 1962-63 academic year, expanding his research in biology with Joshua Lederberg our world lines: briefly merged for five years after we joined the Cornell Astronomy Faculty in 1968. I will always be grateful to Carl for his generosity and warmth toward me and my family at that time of social and scientific upheaval.

I also thanked Him for expanding my consciousness in both fields. Carl established the Planetary Studies Laboratory and became editor-in-chief of a major planetary research journal. Icarus at that time and I wish I could remember how it induced me to immerse myself in strange esoteric studies. such as the general relativity physics of the early universe and the structure of neutron stars to referee some of his papers, he has been the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Science at Cornell since 1977 and is a distinguished visiting scientist at the Propulsion Laboratory a Jet at Caltech Carl has played a leading role in the Mariner Viking and Voyager spacecraft expeditions to our planetary neighbors, for which he received the NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement and the double Medal for Distinguished Public Service.

He was co-founder and president of Planetary. Society the world's largest space interest group of many other scientific awards. I will mention only one of the most recent, the Herald Mazursky Meritorious Service Award from the American Astronomical Society, in part and cite his seminal contributions to the study of planetary atmospheres. The history of earth and exobiology emerges, of course, Carl is best known through books, lectures and television. I note just a few examples: the dragons of Eden, whose stimulating and provocative exploration of the evolution of human intelligence earned him the sheer surprise of cold and darkness an analysis of the global effects of nuclear war here is another Stanford connection two of the Carl's co-authors were Paul Ehrlich and Donnell Kennedy Cosmos the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning book and television series that influenced an unprecedented audience around the world Shadows of the World of Forgotten Ancestors written with his wife and Ruin, the first of a new series that examines what we can learn about ourselves by tracing the evolution of life on Earth in the way Carl has enabled millions of Earth's citizens and many of our politicians. leaders to become aware of the cosmic context of their lives in space and time.

He has elevated the vision from it to our terrestrial planetary and astronomical environment. His efforts and those of many others have borne fruit, most recently with President Clinton's announcement Wednesday that the United States will finally follow a specific timetable to reduce the threat of global warming and sign an international treaty protecting rare and endangered species from extinction. It has brought together what has been learned about the evolution of life and that of our galaxy to illuminate the potential of a carefully organized search for extraterrestrial intelligence. This has also borne fruit in the growth of the SETI program.

We scientists also owe a great debt. with him for his leadership in our common obligation to reveal to the public the fundamental differences between science and pseudoscience and now without further ado the meaning of today's title Is there intelligent life on Earth finally revealed to you? Welcome Carl, thank you Bob for that very generous introduction. Could he ask that the audience lights be all the way up to these good eyes? I have the need to see the comments of my audience, all sleeping. I know it's time to change the subject. I am very happy to be here and renew my long-term association with Stanford and also very pleased with the terms of Mr.

Bunyan I believe that his work combines astrophysics, photochemistry, geophysics, biology and related sciences to provide a broad context of the human species in a way that the public can understand and that is a great task. I will do my best and even try to achieve it. one point, mention a word that includes photochemistry. I would like to do this talk in two parts, the first without slides and the second with both intended in different ways related to provide a sense of perspective and context, and both halves in different ways. We will address the question of whether intelligent life exists on Earth, a question about which you no doubt have certain opinions of your own.

It is a widely debated topic. However, all human cultures without contact with their neighbors have come to the same conclusion about our place on Earth. universe, it is extremely simple, you stand outside and look up and very soon, unless you are an extremely impatient person, you notice that the Sun, the moon and the stars are rising and you say, lift me up through the sky located in the West , the only plausible interpretation is that we are stationary at the center of the universe and all these bodies surround us, the Sun is certainly a very impressive body, we recognize that light and heat emanate from it and yet, despite its obvious power, it hurts us kind of how much, Wow. we must be we must be really something is very impressive we are at the center of the universe also what is the function of the sun the moon and the stars the only possible function is to help us the light of the sun says that by day the moon is a small Persian story about the wise vizier asked what is more important the sun or the moon answering the moon because it shines during the night while the sun shines during the day when it is white anyway and the stars the stars you can navigate by the stars you can know when it is time to plant and when it is time to harvest and earn.

Herds of wild animals are going to migrate. Matters of life and death for our ancestors, so the universe was put here for us and this resonated naturally. a sense of our own importance there was a kind of geocentric conceit that arose throughout the planet and with the exception of a small point associated with the name of Aristarchus of Samos, everyone around the world understood that these were true and famous philosophers, famous scientists. meters of religions all unquestioning we are in the center we are important we are wonderful and if you could imagine a dispassionate extraterrestrial observer looking at this world with everyone saying daily we are wonderful we are in the center they move you I think they would consider us the planet of idiots here it is the Earth revolving around the Sun in the Sun with its proper movement through the galaxy in the galaxy fleeing as part of the Hubble flow and all these little beings in this world were in the center. we are stationary we are wonderful, that would be too harsh or a judgment because there was this unfortunate coincidence, but common sense observations and what we secretly wished were true resonated converged and it was not until the 16th century that Nicholas Copernicus, the alternative model and here he was cautious enough to publish it on his deathbed and because there were sanctions associated with demoting us from some central position introduction to Dave Luciano from Copernicus this written by a guy named Ozzie ender I think it was argued like this now I have no one to Whoever understands the wrong idea does not believe that Copernicus really thought that the earth revolved around the sun, it is not like that, we all know that the sun revolves around the earth as the Bible says, it is just that if you want to calculate where Mars will be in the sky six months in starting Tuesday, then there is an easier way to pretend that the Earth revolves around the Sun even though it does not, and this was the spectator for the next century and a half of those who, except the most radical braggarts like Galileo Galileo, used The first astronomical telescope found some disturbing things.

We discovered that there were moons orbiting Jupiter being Jupiter. It seemed an analogy with the big Sun. Small planets. They discovered that Mercury and Venus went through phases, which is totally incompatible with the standard Earth-centered universe and everything else. There was a pathetic compromise proposed by Tycho Bryan in which the Sun revolves around the Earth but Mercury and Venus revolve around the Sun to explain the phases, but Galileo swore to me that he taught me that Copernicus was right, so the church took it . to their dungeons and pointed out the instruments of torture, after which the Asian astronomer, at least officially AB, rejected this abominable hypothesis, but as time passes the evidence becomes increasingly stronger and long before the definitive evidence that the Earth It revolves around the Sun, that is, the annual parallax of the stars that were not discovered until the 19th century, but long before that, I mean, the scientific and to some extent popular view made this very heavy transition from us in the center to the Sun in the center, but each step was a kind of compromise in which people tried to rescue the centrality in some other way and let me just a few examples.

Okay, this is in rough chronological order, but not exactly. Okay, so we're not in the Sun of Suns in the center, but we are close to the center right. Well, I, because we are close to the Sun, the Sun is at the center of the universe, so we participate in the centrality, maybe not as much as we want and there is nothing else like the Sun, right, and there is nothing else like Earth, true, but then further away. Telescopic observations show that those other planets that feature clouds, polar caps and strange rings, the idea that those were worlds on equal footing with Earth but with different environments grew and there were people, some people deeply depressed about it and then the discovery that the stars There were suns very far away and, since the planets are small and shine only in weakly reflected light, perhaps many of those other stars have systemsplanetaries around it, okay, but maybe, but we are in the center of the collection of stars in the Milky Way.

I walk galaxy and that's worth something, no, don't mention it, but then observations in the 19th century showed that it wasn't true that we were in some pathetically remote spiral arm in the galactic desert from which we couldn't even rescue a central position. and it turned out that we weren't even the only galaxy, although the spiral nebulae turned out to be other galaxies too, then the expansion of the universe was discovered and then for a moment it seemed as if everything had been saved because all those other galaxies were running away from us as if We might have some nasty cosmic disease, but at least we're in the center.

You could see it and for a moment it resonated wonderfully with what we hoped was the case, but then it was perfectly pointed out that an astronomer in any of those galaxies would see exactly the same thing, and the move again now was not only this deep provincialization of the attitudes that were occurring in astronomy, but in many other fields, the most surprising. Example is evolution, okay, maybe astronomically there is nothing central about us, but when it comes to life, we are central , we are great, we are the best, all life on Earth was put here to serve us and they are supposed to get out of it.

They come to us as the book of Genesis says and they are there for us to use as we want and we are especially creative and they calmed us a lot, but about 130 years ago the Origin of Species was published. and it became clear that there was a mechanism that did not involve any supernatural intervention by which it could be understood how all beings on earth had evolved through slow processes by much more humble means and with the publication of The Descent of Man, Darwin was very cautious . in On the Origin of Species, everything he said about our evolution was something like, and these ideas might turn out to be relevant to our origins, however bold he was willing to be in that book, but 10 years later, yeah, about 10 years. then he went all the way and also spoke directly about human evolution and in physics since Newton's time it had been conventional to describe our frame of velocity as a frame of privileged motion, that was the word used, something special privileged about our not position, but speed, and Einstein growing up in a Russia, dominated by Central Europe as a member of a despised minority, knew something about the emotional resonance of the idea of ​​privilege and was suspicious of the idea from the beginning and began to think about what physics would be like. if there were no privileged frames of reference and yet the laws of nature had to be the same from the point of view of each moving observer and this is the central starting point of special relativity, so one could argue, and there are several other cases like this, that many of the central debates in The History of Science have to do with the challenge to the emotionally satisfying feeling that we are somehow sensual or special and in all cases these are not topics simply discussed by scientists themselves, the public is deeply involved almost always on the side of Don.

It doesn't change anything, it has been bad enough to rescue at least a small special privilege of sensuality for us and in each case the evidence, unfortunately for those who hold that view, has gone the other way. Now I don't want to suggest that scientists understand overwhelming evidence and then everyone agrees, far from it, for example the geocentric consensus with us is still embedded in the language: the sun rises, the sun sets, I got up before dawn , what is the place by which, instead of pretending that we are stationary, we recognize in the language that says that it is the Earth rotating says that the Sun is below our tangent plane because of the rotation of the Earth, I mean, a child of four years is gone when you tried, you have to say that it will return before the Sun passes below the tangent. the ingenuity of the plane cannot find a way to incorporate it into the language we are so geocentric designed by li it is so natural to us we talk about a new world the serious world of the world a billion worlds in the Milky Way maybe a trillion by the way me I never said that thing about billions and billions of things that Johnny Carson said.

I never said it. It's too imprecise. It's vague. There are billions and billions of stars. What is that? It doesn't mean anything you say you know 400 billion stars okay wow you're getting there and when the cosmos series was recently reconfigured for, you know, video cassette sales and a new updated version in the term network. I had to listen to everything I said. I didn't think I said it, but who knew, so I was sitting on tenterhooks for all 13 episodes, I'm going to say it, I'm going to say it, I never said it, where was I? Yes, the world, the language has it incorporated, what surrounds us is special and, when it comes to evolution, you know what is in this country. especially a devout rearguard action to prevent it from being taught in schools there is a topic with the contradictory name scientific creationism that you know that the first and the second word contradict each other and that there are many people who are very strong but do not want to hear that we evolved from ohms whose are not uplifting clay, we don't want them to come from their angels, that's where we belong and I think those are the emotional roots behind the desire for us to be central now in this debate, the expanding fabric of scientific progress and ghosts in different centuries in different ways this same debate and today we are where that debate is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence that Bob mentioned is clearly one, there are many people who do not want there to be extraterrestrial intelligence or if they are going to be there, they should be more dumber than us because if they are smarter, especially much smarter, that is demoralizing, at least let us be the smartest being of these beings in the universe, that doesn't ask for much, just know. four hundred billion stars in this galaxy 100 billion other galaxies maybe most stars have planets so that we are the smartest is not asking much, something reasonable, don't you think?

We may also have evolved from other beings, but there are characteristics of humans that are completely different, it is not a matter of degree, but rather radical species differences with respect to other animals. no one uses tools except us. Nobody makes tools except us. nobody is rational. none of those other animals can foresee the future consequences of present actions. They are not altruistic. while my arm of things said to be special about us enunciated by all the great philosophical and scientific figures in Western history, from Aristotle and Plato to Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, through leading figures of the present day, all of whom They turn out to be wrong.

I mean observation II The wrong chimpanzees make tools with a clear I about what the future use will be. There is a chimpanzee termite fishing industry that involves technology so difficult that he tells Leakey, a competent anthropologist and primate researcher who spent four months as an apprentice to a chimpanzee named Leakey in Tanzania and the Gumby reserve following the chimpanzee watching in the gym so he could learn the technology in the four months nowhere he couldn't do any of that there were about ten steps you can follow, one of them Jim from the men You know, his whole life watching other chimpanzees do it learning of Lake.

You were only there a few months. It was difficult for the other things too. The other characteristics presumably weaken us. Now I'm not pretending that there are some thoughts that have jet. planes or nuclear weapons or other signs of high intelligence, but remember, remember we didn't have them for most of humans' tenure on Earth and biologically we were the same a hundred thousand years ago as we are today, so building a civilization cannot be what distinguishes us and it is difficult to find what is maybe it is my image, except that chimpanzees and bonobos are showing great ease these days and there is even a gorilla on the Stanford campus or taken to talk with Amazon, well, another area of ​​this dispute is what is called the anthropic principle where, in my opinion, a desperate attempt is being made to rescue some centrality for us.

The argument is that if you change your mind, you look at how to actually do it, the laws of nature, or you change the values ​​of the fundamental physical constants. then, in many cases, a universe is produced that is contrary to the evolution of human beings, stars, scarce atoms that do not stay together are not obtained, or stars are obtained, but they evolved throughout their entire stellar evolution and in a week, so life is impossible now there are two ways to look at this, one is yes, we are the product of the type of universe we live in, what did you expect? and the other is that the laws of nature and the physical constants are created the way they are so that 15 billion years later, you will be gone and if that were true, then that salvages the whole anthropocentric presumption.

We may not be in the center, but the laws of nature were designed for our benefit. You can't look up and see it. mostly on the phone, but if you are a really smart physicist you can examine the laws of nature and see that everything was made for us, one of the many shortcomings of this argument and for the reasons I just mentioned in a historical report. Within the framework that we should suspect from the beginning, what the human being must clarify is that Dolan has made a systematic effort to look at all those other hypothetical universes and see if they are consistent.

It was a very different kind of life than ours and you know, it's a very difficult thing to do, of course, but the idea that if the precise sequence of events that led us to it is not duplicated, then life is impossible, is Since I can't say that extraterrestrial intelligent beings are not pressured batarians, and they are not. intelligent, we could imagine that they do not have to exactly follow the cultural motifs of our civilization and could still be intelligent. Well, it has been a painful story and the pain is still with us. Many people compare this idea of ​​an unstructured universe for us with the idea that that comforting, helpful, friendlier, family-oriented universe, in which everything was done for us and, of course, the latter is friendlier than the first, but it seems to me that we have an obligation to understand what the universe is really like because the universe has no obligation to settle for vanity.

Now I would like to narrow the focus and talk about one particular question that, as I said before, most people believe and for good reason know the answer to and that is: is there intelligent life on Earth now? What I mean specifically is that if you were an extraterrestrial ray examining the Earth from space for the first time, could you detect life? How easy would it be to detect all the aspects of life that we consider important or just some minor or frivolous aspects of current life? This is something I enjoyed speculating about for many years but of course it was difficult to do until there was some sort of failure at NASA, i.e. it was unable to send sizable payloads to the planet Jupiter with just one rocket and therefore Therefore, to get there you had to do gravitational assist maneuvers in which you fall into the gravitational potential of the Other World and it accelerates you and if you do your gravitational billiards well, you will eventually be able to accelerate to be able to reach Jupiter, which otherwise you would not be able to do. the mission involved.

Galileo is on his way to Jupiter and he made two close passes to the Earth, I mean a few hundred kilometers from the surface and a close pass to Venus, as I say only as a propulsion maneuver, but it seemed to me that here was the opportunity that had been there. waiting, let's turn on those instruments and look at the Earth and see if we can detect life. All instruments are designed to search for Jupiter and therefore this is a way to gauge the conclusion tentatively drawn from other missions as we fly. world after world that there is no life there, it's a suspect conclusion unless we've done the control experiment of looking at our own planet and seeing if we can actually detect life, so in the rest of this talk I'm going to mainly use I won't say the Galileo results for the very high resolution images because the highest surface resolution of Galileo was about a kilometer, but for the most part I will say and I will not always say where the images come from, but as I say most of them are ours Galileo, so I asked you to free your mind from all prejudice and imagine that you have no idea what kind of place the Earth is, the first data, except its distance from the star, etc., from this flyby, what can you find ? so the first slide we can have the lights off now it's just for orientation so here we are this is our moon notice the artist has forgottendraw any of the other moons of sixty other moons or so here's Jupiter where Galileo is heading and do it, he did something like this, well it has to go around the Sun and finally you get the next slide of Jupiter please here There is a beautiful photo taken last January of the Earth and the Moon together by Galileo and here we have a resolution of what a few hundred kilometers or so away is a blue and white planet and beyond that heart to know what is happening at least looking at the next slide this is not a gala photo I'm not going to do it and that is what is and what is not here You can see that there are evanescent white things in the clouds of the atmosphere only to take a photo ten minutes later and you will see that there are some changes after a few hours of changes, there are some blue things and some brown things, the blue and the brown. things don't change white things do I can't tell if there's anything alive here can you?

I mean, there's certainly meteorological interest if you look closely at a permanent ice cap it's something that freezes down there where it's clearly colder colder that doesn't freeze or at least not as much up here what's the white furnace material what's the cap polar what is the blue material what is the brown material that is something you would certainly like to know about this photograph that is taking An ordinary reflected visible light. The image below is the exact same view from the same satellite. The next slide, please look at the thermal infrared. Here we are looking at the infrared radiation emitted by the Earth in which the temperature scale is: grays are cold and reds are hot. that the yellows are even hotter and, of course, it is quite hot here, except for this region that was covered by clouds in the previous image and this region is covered all the time with clouds and what we are seeing is a thermal radiation of 10 microns.

The Earth is emitted unhindered into space. The next slide shows the same view again. Next slide please, but at a wavelength of 2.2 microns where carbon dioxide and water vapor are absorbed and you can't see anything on the surface you're looking at. atmosphere and this means that there you don't know what carbon dioxide and water are yet. From time to time I will slip in and say what we know from another date. I'll try to be explicit when I do that and this immediately means that it should be a greenhouse effect and that in the infrared there are places that are opaque or semi-opaque to the infrared. thermal radiation that the Earth tries to radiate into space to cool itself and, as a result, the average temperature that the Earth has to rise to a higher temperature than it would otherwise have, one can easily calculate what the equilibrium temperature should be just from the heliocentric. distance from the Earth and its albedo and I find that it is about 30 degrees Celsius warmer than it should be and the obvious answer to that 30 degrees Celsius is the greenhouse effect for which the molecules are responsible.

The next slide here is the Galileo data and the first thing I want to point out is that this is 0.72 1 microns in the very near infrared. This is an intensity scale and you can see this set of absorption features due to atmospheric water vapor. You can quickly calculate what the amount of water vapor implies, but I'm wondering what that means. The noise implied by these spectra is the amount that would be expected at equilibrium on a watery planet, and thus the idea that oceans are water, that clouds are condensed water vapor, and that the polar is the sound system. or just someone approaching. down and that the override I will say that if I stay here nothing will happen, then okay, I guess I will do that then and that the polar cap well below the freezing point of water is frozen water, so that's very good.

I have identified this, this principle is an important component of the Earth and in fact it is unique, there is no other planet covered in water in the solar system. Now there's something else that appears here at about 0.75 microns, let's say a band and that's molecular oxygen, which is another one. By unique circumstance we know where the planet has a significant amount of molecular oxygen and we immediately have to ask ourselves how does all this molecular oxygen exist, where does it come from now the first thing you think is and here I go. To make a photochemical observation, it is the ultraviolet photodissociation of water vapor in which UV photons enter and break the water, hydrogen atoms escape into space from the upper atmosphere or exosphere, oxygen accumulates and that is why that you have 20% molecular oxygen, but when you look at it in detail, including the concern about the oxidation of the Earth's crust, it becomes very difficult, perhaps not impossible, it is very difficult to understand how throughout geological time it was possible accumulate so much oxygen and if that is the case, if there are not enough ultraviolet photons from the sun to separate the water enough, then you have to do it another way, there are many more visible photons than ultraviolet photons, but a single visible photon cannot separates the water, you have to add two of them and There is no non-biological way to do it, but if you had biology, if you could use two photons of visible light to break up a water molecule and release oxygen, then you could explain it now.

This is not like this. I want to pretend that this is a very strong argument. There are many uncertainties if the truth on the ground is not known, but the large amount of molecular oxygen is an indication that supports the suspicion that there must be life on Earth and it would have to be very widespread to capture so many photons. Throughout geological time, the infrared spectrum now gives us another clue to life and in a very different way. Next slide, please, here is the infrared spectrum from 2.4 to 3 point 8 microns and here from 4 to 5 point 2, and note the presence of methane nitrous oxide. carbon dioxide, all the greenhouse gases and, in fact, those greenhouse gases together with co2 and water explain the observed greenhouse effect very well, but I want to say something about the characteristic of methane of 2.33 microns, maybe I can have the lights on for Justin, it's the chemical balance of methane and the presence of excess oxygen is to convert methane to carbon dioxide in water, it just oxidizes and it does so very quickly and there is no kinetic barrier for it and then you can calculate.

I'll show you a table in a minute. The thermodynamic equilibrium abundance of methane should be in this excess oxygen where it would naturally tend and is something like one molecule of methane in ten to the one hundred and thirty-five molecules in the Earth's atmosphere, the mixing ratio should be ten in the... less than 30 v, but there are not ten to one hundred and thirty-five molecules in the Earth's atmosphere, in fact, there are nothing like ten to 135 elementary particles in the entire universe, it's just something like that like 10 to 79 or 88, so this is the same as saying that there shouldn't be a single molecule of methane in the Earth's atmosphere and yet doing a little study of the molecules right here, excuse me, what kind of you, what kind of huge guy you find that one in a million are methane, so that's what a hundred and a discrepancy of twenty-nine orders of magnitude, even in planetary astronomy, this is a significant discrepancy and what must be the answer: it must be that methane is coming out of the interior of the Earth and its speed is so fast that it exceeds the tendency of thermodynamic equilibrium to oxidize methane now, what must be those sources of contemporary methane?

First of all, you look at Mars and Venus and there is essentially no methane there, so those planets are not producing methane on other planets closer to Earth and in a wide variety of senses and in fact, now my truth is that all methane sources are biological natural gas leaks and oil wells, that's old biology and then a lot of new biology Swamp methane methane bacteria in swamps as auxiliaries to rice cultivation and trying to put this delicate bovine flatulence now thank you for a moment here is a spaceship flying near the earth trying to find life on earth and what it shows, among other things, these intimate intestinal activities of the luminous ones is not at the top of our list of What we consider the most important activities of life on Earth we might not have guessed that that is what is detectable.

I do not at all intend for you to see the 3.33 micron characteristic and conclude, aha, bovine flatulence, but still, it is very unexpected what I consider important and what appears does not match perfectly. The next slide shows a table of thermodynamics. This balance is illuminated. The next slide, please, and oh, I underestimated, is from ten to one hundred and forty-five, so there is a discrepancy of one hundred and thirty-nine orders of magnitude. In other areas, what Galileo found and what the standard ground truth values ​​are are exactly the same and this is just another way of saying that Galileo was able to characterize the molecules that detected what we have here now.

I want to move on to quite a different area, next slide please, and that's photography, can you find it by looking for signs of life? It would? By the way, there is a fundamental reason why flash photography of projected slides does not work, let's move on to the next slide, like this now. when the Galileo imaging system has a wonderful filter wheel in front of it with many filters and we can take pictures with any three filters we want and then reconstruct a color image in which let's say we assign the 0.72 micron channel to blue and as long as we have images in three colors simultaneously and then convert them to blue, green and red, we can make beautiful color images that will show what we observe and what is absorbed in the correct region when we take those photographs of the Earth.

We found that, broadly speaking, there are three general types of regions on the continent: severe a area in which there is a constant increase in reflectivity with increasing wavelength, slightly reddish surface material that is consistent with a wide range of minerals and mineral assemblages which is the geological part of the conference and an area B where there is somewhat flat across some of the visible but very steep right here at the end of the red and then Area C which is extremely steep at the red edge to 0, 7 microns and this means that there are some widely available pigments that absorb into the red and there is no known mineral or set of minerals that can plausibly explain that and therefore this pigment is presumed evidence of life in the Earth and maybe it is the pigment that absorbs visible light, so it can add to visible light. photons to photo dissociate water and explain oxygen too, so now I want to show you four specially prepared and brightly colored photographs of Galileo's Earth, in which the areas with this strong absorption are probably orange, so here it is South and Central America.

North American sun and could we focus a little on this jar, please, well, and you can see that the truth on the ground has appeared again, that for vast regions of South America, under the white clouds, there is a vivid orange that It is the core of the year and the Andes are our grave. They don't have much vegetation the rest is noticeable in the Amazon, which used to be deep orange, there is a lot of orange fading because of the way the magenta colors are due to the band of water vapor in this region the magenta colors are vapor of water associated with clouds next slide here is the Central Pacific Australia New Zealand Tierra del Fuego and what is this maybe Hawaii and the little piece of land that you can see New Zealand certainly looks very pigmented we will just move around the land next slide here's Australia and a little bit of pigmentation that we saw, turns out it's not an anomaly, the vast majority of it is unpigmented and unvegetated, but Indonesia is certainly Southeast Asia, it's certainly India, it's certainly the next slide and here we are in Africa, maybe focus again, please, you went too.

Go back, okay and here you can see the Sahara and the Saudi Arabian desert without vegetation. A sharp line of demarcation between desert and vegetation is a transition region, but there are some clouds, but there are a lot of them. All of this was heavily overgrown at one time. I don't see much, but Namibia and the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, you can't see much vegetation here and if we had a time series of photographs of this type over the last few decades, we would see that the orange decreases, so the earth rotates. Outside of this type of photography, it is loaded with biological pigments, photosynthetic pigments, and of course the pigment in question is chlorophyll.

It is the red mane of chlorophyll, and if we had had filters for the blue there, the blue man would have appeared just as well now next to it. slide I want to go to a different way of looking for life on Earth mainly to see it directly, let's go to increasingly higher resolution images of the Earth and see if we can find wherewe find signs of life not to do so. To be parochial, this is where I live, right there, there is no sign of life or intelligence at all. This false color photograph, which is conventional and will be used in several other images, has liquid water, black clouds, white, and red vegetation.

The next slide shows a perfect image. Typical situation in which there is a break in the vegetation environment and the big cities appear dirty, mainly without vegetation, I don't know if you can see it but there is a kind of red rectangle right there that is the center of New York. Park at this resolution a few miles something like this with no signs of life the next slide takes us to California this is the Salton Sea this is the Imperial Valley and those of you who don't pass the Rayleigh resolution criteria will notice that there are a kind of checkerboard pattern of reds and blacks here that looks like the words at least show something highly geometric when you get to this resolution of about 100 meters when you go down to a resolution of tens of meters suddenly all over the earth, deserts and oceans, apart similar related patterns are shown on the next slide this is Aragon and these are circular irrigation is not the correct word, you know, they spray water with these circular things there is a technical word that I have forgotten and all over the planet you see circles, squares, rectangles, triangles are in short supply and I'm not sure what an alien would deduce.

I suppose the most that could be deduced is that the dominant organisms on the planet, whoever they are, have a simultaneous passion for territoriality and Euclidean geometry. Beyond that, you wouldn't know much, but that's already pretty advanced. to understand each other, I think now, if you could do better, on the next slide, please say ten year resolution, then the geometric patterns become glorious. This is a snapshot of Washington DC and may answer the long-debated question of whether there is intelligent life. If you are tentatively affirmative, you will recognize that this is the tour of the famous part, including the nation's capital, many straight lines and not only many straight lines within the cities, but many straight lines connecting the cities, in fact, the Straight lines cross the planet. there's a lot of, it's clearly important if your resolution could now improve another order of magnitude, so you go down to one meter resolution, you would find that the straight lines are clogged with very patient little beings, one after the other, which by At night they make signs with two little ones.

Lights are turned on in front of them so they know where they are going and sometimes they go to little houses to sleep at night. Someone, unfortunately, simply swept it into the street. Well, most of them seem to sleep on the streets. Homeless dominant organisms are the conclusion, but they have clearly reorganized the planet for their own convenience and we aliens would love to finally plumb the depths of resolution so that we can see the dominant life forms on the planet and, In fact, we could do better than that. There is a type of parasitology that we can do because we reached a resolution greater than one meter, small parasites could be seen entering and leaving the dominant organisms.

I think we would have every reason to be extremely pleased with ourselves. Well, now I want to mention two more signs of life on Earth. Next is the visible light at night. This is the visible light of daylight. What happens if you photograph the Earth at night? Next slide please, this picture of course was oh no, that was a groan or an ooh, this picture of course was not taken all at once as it is a mosaic, but it is in the projection of Mercator what looks like the night side of the earth, so let's try to get through it quickly, the brightest region of the earth at night has absolutely nothing to do with life or intelligence, that's the northern lights, everything else, every other point of light you see is due to intelligent life.

You can see this beautiful outline of the shape of the major continents that match exactly what we see in daylight. for some reason the dominant beings have illuminated the continental margins and we know that their cities we look at that if you look closely here you can see us talking right here in this and you can see that there are continental interiors that are not illuminated, but there are many places. I want to show you two, there are several, but two types of lights at night, not because of cities, one that you can see here in North Africa and the Middle East, those are not very densely populated with city lights.

What we're seeing there is natural gas flaring and oil wealth, flaring, and it's very interesting that that is and of course this is variable over time and in the long term a lot of images like this would appear like something different. Look now at Japan, you can see it lit from bow to stern. The only other place this densely lit in terms of cities is here in Western Europe, but I want to draw your attention to this: You see this triangle here now, what is that? The Sea of ​​Japan, those are not cities, that is not even land, what is it?

Can I have the lights please? In fact, it is the Japanese squid fishing fleet. They shine bright lights at night over a vast area of ​​the ocean, so it's to trick the squid into thinking. that it is daytime the squid come to the surface and are killed there it is a mass murder of invertebrates in fact another way of saying that it is one of the signs of life on earth visible from space is sushi who would have thought that the sushi is visible look what it is? It's not visible, but sushi is now the other way Galileo detected life.

This, by the way, is the defense weather satellite. This is not Galileo. Galileo has a plasma wave spectrometer that detects radio emissions designed for synchrotron emission from the trap. radiation belts around Jupiter as we approach on the night side above the plasma frequency which is at a frequency of four five six megahertz there is a set of modulated radio emissions because it is above the plasma frequency which can come from the surface because it is in At night, the ionosphere is not very high, the electron density is not very high as you pass over the planet from the dark side to the light side, the electron density of the ionosphere increases and the signals disappear, and it is very difficult to understand that in terms other than technology and intelligence and it may not be clear, it may be the very low frequency radio signals that the US Navy gives to submarines with weapons distant nuclear weapons, let's assume that's the case, now look at what you see from space, the bovine flatulence sushi and the means to launch missiles that can destroy 200 cities now and some other things, as I say now that it's just not al less my sense of the significant signs of life on earth that an enormous amount of our art music literature culture science compassion cannot be seen from this altitude in this way it is a kind of parable of what is seen and what is not.

In any case, the conclusion is tremendously positive: from a spacecraft like Galileo it is possible to detect life on Earth in many different aspects in many different frequency ranges and, therefore, the negative conclusions drawn with similar instruments from other planets are probably are correct: we have calibrated the The search for life on other planets in our solar system says nothing about other solar systems. Now that we've come this far in our search for life on Earth, it would make sense to go into orbit around Earth and take a closer look and look for changes. and I just want Reef Lee in the rest of the talk to give some insight into the next slide please, so here's a river delta in Madagascar soaked in topsoil and actually the rate of topsoil loss. in the Indian Ocean it is very large. that can be calculated from this and other rivers in Madagascar that it can be calculated that at this rate there will be no more overflows in Madagascar in a few decades and something similar is not that spectacular there are too many places on earth that aliens would discover that We are By losing, we are allowing the type of soil necessary for vegetation to grow to be lost.

Surely that seems bad. The next slide is a former Czechoslovakia and a former East Germany, but it could be any industrialized place and you can see huge amounts of industrial zones. pollutants and carbon dioxide coming out of the smokestacks into the atmosphere the next slide is a twilight photo of the Amazon basin every point of light you see here are burned forests and again you could do a calculation that shows that these places with vegetation are so Bright orange spots, especially in regions, especially in equatorial latitudes, are being lost at a phenomenal rate, they cannot continue for long until there is none of this left.

It couldn't have been happening for long, otherwise it will all disappear now that we have reached with this planet at some critical moment in its evolution when the dominant organisms are being put at risk. The next slide shows what can be determined from the earth orbit this was actually determined from the ground the annual variation in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the ups and downs are because the northern deciduous forests produce leaves that take you out of the atmosphere and then the leaves fall off and fall and more CO2 is coming in, so there is an annual oscillation, but the overall trend is alarmingly pronounced, the average amount of carbon dioxide being dumped into the atmosphere is consistent with burning all this vegetation and fossil fuels, but we know that co2 is a greenhouse gas and the next slide shows that this not only happens with co2 but also with methane, but the cows are busy and with chlorofluorocarbons, which are not only a potent greenhouse gas. but we also maybe know of an extremely effective agent for depleting the protective ozone layer, so something really strange is happening on this planet, stripping the top layer of soil, destroying the protective ozone layer, they are polluting the atmosphere and they are doing uncontrolled action and A massive climate experiment brought all of this together and the preliminary conclusion that there is intelligent life on Earth would surely need to be reevaluated.

I haven't given this lecture very often, but I have given it a few times before and when I stopped here. I think it's a real disappointment, so I'm not going to stop here and I want to try to finish up, so let me just two more slides. The next slide is focus, please, you can't focus too much, but we can do better than that. oh, okay, this is the last photograph taken of Neptune and its enigmatic moon Triton when the Voyager 2 spacecraft abandoned it after its epic journey through the outer solar system photographing and obtaining other data from approximately 60 worlds, many of them completely new to us. opening of the outer solar system to the human species these two Voyager spacecraft and two spacecraft that preceded them pioneer 10 or 11 have such high speeds that they will inexorably escape the solar system and become the first artifact of the human species to manufacture To interstellar space, they surely travel very slowly, but it is still a triumph of our engineering to have been able to do that and an example of what our science and technology could do if given the real opportunity that it wanted since the early days of the Voyager mission. look back and try to take a picture of Earth from the outskirts of the system, only the manufacturers guaranteed that Voyager would work all the way to Saturn, but again due to the brilliance of JPL engineers and the fact that they got smarter faster . that lloyd went dumb it worked on uranus and it worked on neptune and only after this photo was taken only after we passed neptune could I convince myself of the project of turning the cameras back and taking one last look at the earth and on some other planets I didn't imagine there would be much science, but I thought we could learn something from that image, so my last slide is the result.

This is Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, the movements of Uranus and Neptune came closer and are here momentarily. in a ray of sunshine it's here look, it's us call everyone you know everyone you love everyone you've ever heard of every human being who ever lived lived there every couple in love every child every prince and pauper every teacher and student every corrupt politician every revered religious leader every determined conqueror of the Empire lived again in that little blue dot, our pretensions, our Manifesto, astronomy is sometimes described as a humiliating experience and I think that is what this image tells me, This blue dot is fragile, vulnerable and a reminder to us that we have an obligation. to care for and appreciate this world, the only home our species has ever known.

Thank you very much Carl for a wonderful journey through the universe now that we all know how importantwe are in the scheme of things or how intelligent we are as a species. We are all invited to ask some questions. If you still have some self-esteem left, then you can muster up the courage. Go to one of the microphones in the hallway. Come ahead and we'll answer questions from different halls or anything else you think might be of interest. interest and I ask you not to be demoralized by the talk that was simply, that was the reality.

I didn't mean it to be demoralizing, we can, if we want, in some way where we are special, where we are important, then it is up to us to achieve that path and we certainly can do it. He was arguing alone against an undeserved central position. Something we want to know thanks to the effort on our part. Yes, no, you are absolutely right. We did not have. I don't have detectors at those frequencies, but in fact the Earth burns at those frequencies of that small part of the radio band that passes through the ionosphere in military television radars and in astronomical radars, all of that is not only easily seen from a spacecraft a few hundred kilometers from Earth but detectable at interstellar distances, which is one of the reasons it makes sense to listen for signals from other civilizations if our inadvertent radio leak in our relatively new radio civilization can be detected with our own level of detection equipment at the nearest point. stars and more advanced civilizations could be detectable at much greater distances.

Yeah, what you didn't mention is whether our little probe would notice that there are other things in orbit now, if there's weather there, it wasn't just in orbit after everything we said. It was a flyby, it wasn't in orbit and no, nothing like that, there's a lot of debris up there, but very little big enough to see. Remember a resolution of one kilometer a few hundred kilometers away, so in space you would have to have a kiloliter sized spacecraft just a few hundred kilometers away to be detectable and as far as I know, not there are.

You speak into the microphone so everyone can hear. This is a general category of questions that are often asked and I don't know which model in particular. you had in mind, but what a lot of people have in mind is not to reveal our position because the expert rescue will come here and eat us because we grass boys read other animals, so don't come here and eat us. Why do I think this is nothing to worry about first? What is worth crossing interstellar distances around us? We have such a delicate taste that it is worth crossing these immense interstellar distances together.

It seems unlikely to me, but I could be wrong, suppose they are a gourmet's delight why not just steal from a human being sequence the amino acids and manufacture the sequence on their planet of origin why they have to steal many human beings is just a question of profitability now another concern that arises from most people who have a deep understanding of human nature is that the aliens will recognize that sooner or later they will be a danger to them and perhaps they should come and anticipate what you believe Here is the Earth in absolute radio silence for four and a half billion years, except for a sporadic or occasional occasion. war Oh, kill me radiation or something and then suddenly in the late '40s with widespread commercial television, there becomes an expanding spherical wave that travels at the speed of light one light year a year and then It encompasses the stars nearby and right now.

It is 45 light years away and there is whatever is 45 light years away from hundreds of stars, something like that may already be worth more than a thousand and if there is someone there they will listen to find out what this is and what they will hear. I'll listen to Hello Doody Milton Berle, the military, the McCarthy hearings, and other signs of intelligent life on earth. Sometimes I get asked if there is a lot of intelligent life, why aren't they here now? You know it's a sign of his intelligence, no. I'm just joking, but in any case it's too late and many times you get letters in the newspapers saying, for the love of God, astronomers, you don't know what you're doing, keep quiet, you'll give us away, those letters should be addressed to radio stations. television to the Department of Defense and planetary radar and I would like to suggest that Len Tyler, who is in the audience, would be happy to hear any complaints about planetary radar and just talk.

I think this kind of question is interesting because it's a kind of Rorschach test, you know, we project onto aliens what worries us about ourselves and for good reason, for perfectly good reasons, just like Orson Welles' 1938 broadcast about the alien invasion was a concern about what was happening in Europe and that's why the resonance was so was so high, these questions illuminate what worries us about ourselves, well, if there are, yes, I wanted to ask you, are we becoming very good at observing the ozone holes and increasing CO2, and all of that gives me, I guess, good ideas of what we can do with this information more than just inform the public, I mean, we know that the ozone hole is It's getting bigger.

People know that we are still using our cars and I mean legislation is slowly changing this but do you have any ideas about what other things we can do with this information to inform the public but in a democracy that is what you want to do . I mean, the theory is that the people who run the country and the people in Washington work for us and not the other way around, which is more often the reality, but to the extent that the Jeffersonian ideal is valid, then the people They're exactly who we should be talking to because we're the guys at risk, you know, we bureaucrats will just stay inside the Capitol and let other people get out for them so what can we do?

The first thing we can do is absolutely BAM chlorofluorocarbons and similar compounds that are efficiently destroying the ozone layer. You know how it works. I have many things to say about this. I'm trying to I bite my tongue CFC molecules are precisely because they are so inert that they would design brilliantly. They do not occur in nature because they do not react chemically. That was the reason they were safe. They survived the stratosphere. If there were more photochemistry where they are. photo dissociated and the released chlorine atoms catalytically preside over the destruction of a large number of zone molecules in a remarkable way, I mean, in some ways, it is surprising and very hopeful that the major industrial nations on the planet have agreed to phase out CFCs and they did it in the Montreal Protocol before. it was completely clear that there was a substitute that could power our refrigerators and air conditioners etc., and for industrial nations to do that in such circumstances is a sign of how dangerous it is;

It's not talked about as being that dangerous, but the fact that it was done in what was 87 is a clear indication of how dangerous it is not and it is dangerous for three four categories of reasons, one of which is heard about an increase much greater risk of skin cancer and especially for light skinned people like me. true, if you have more melanin you are better protected and skin cancer is serious, as are cataracts, that is one category, a second, much more serious category is that prolonged exposure to ultraviolet light compromises the human immune system and in That sense is like eight and third.

The way is that prolonged exposure to increased ultraviolet light attacks the primary producers of photosynthesis, the plants at the base of the food chain, the phytoplankton in the oceans, which have to live near the surface in order to harvest the sunshine; They are not protected against ultraviolet light. a few centimeters of seawater do not absorb nearby UV rays, if they leave, then the Zul plankton that eats them and the little fish that you eat and the shrimp that eat the little fish in the bag, the shrimp that eat the Zula plankton. and the small fish eat the shrimp and the big fish eat the small fish they and the dolphins the whales the people at the top of the pyramid all of that, for all we know, could collapse in a similar way on earth, it's very serious and the stopgap called HCFCs that do not destroy the ozone layer and almost the same amount still does, and the great danger that exists is that CFCs are put into the atmosphere and it takes approximately a century before they disappear on their own , so stopping at the year 2000 is the present to achieve the goal. and by 2100 we will be able to go outdoors.

I'm exaggerating, but anyway, the first thing we can do is practically done, it should speed up a bit, but other than that, we are causing global warming. much more difficult because it is not only about taking on the DuPont company, the main manufacturers, but it is also about the main sources of income for the owners and workers of the coal, oil, gas, rubber, rubber and chemicals, together, and that is a very powerful political policy. strength and that alone means this is much harder, it's like if we were serious we would be committed to much more efficient use of fossil fuels why do we drive 25 mile per gallon cars when you could drive cars of 50, 70, 90 miles per gallon that the technology is within our reach fluorescents instead of incandescent lamps, etc., that is a vast area where we save money, greater efficiency and also free ourselves from this slavish dependence on foreign sources of oil which causes wars, among other things, every reason to do so, even if I didn't believe the global warming greenhouse effect argument, beyond alternative energy sources besides fossil fuels, including solar electric wind turbines, conversion biomass, hydrogen fuel, etc.

I do not include nuclear energy in that list, although it is perfect in terms of the greenhouse effect. The effect is because you have another problem, that's what we should be doing, that's what President Clinton said two days ago, in a small way, to reduce our CO2 emissions by the year 2002, which they were in the year nine, 19, okay, better than the official and that's the kind of thing people should encourage governments to do and there's also a way to discourage corporations from buying products that destroy the ozone layer or reduce global warming. That's a very long answer.

I'm right. I'm ready for that question, thanks for asking me. Yes, we seem to think about potential alien intelligent life on our own terms. Is there any valid reason to project our concept of sentience and our assumption that all life should be carbon-based? aliens, there is nothing in this argument that I have presented that is based on that kind of chauvinistic thermodynamic imbalance that you could have with life based on anything if the surface of some planet was covered with the largest number of silicon-based giraffes if they made large geometric reworking of the surface of that planet we would see that it does not depend, that it does not make assumptions about the type of life, nor does radio transmission, so I don't think we are as provincial as there might be a tendency.

To think that we believe that the most important aspect of the space program right now is programs like Galileo or Cassini that go to planets that are too far away and look at them or it is exploration like the manned mission to Mars that many of us listen to with concern or it is other missions on the planet Earth, back-facing type things on Earth, the question I'll talk about tomorrow on Do you have skates, another sign of intelligent life on Earth, skates are cool, you don't take them off when you come to conferences, you might you have to go quickly.

My biggest difficulties are justifying the men's and women's program and tomorrow I will talk about the arguments for and against. They clearly involve the largest amount of money and for that reason are immediately vulnerable. the other things that space does and I don't limit myself to NASA, I expanded on them, but let me mention them briefly and see if I think they all resonate with at least some of the things on this list. I think it is tremendously profitable communication. satellites that connect the planet we can talk to almost anyone on earth now the provincialization of the most distant countries is due to communication satellites weather satellites that save billions of dollars every year simply by avoiding crop failures with a little time in advance to farmers to take precautions military reconnaissance and treaty verification satellites to calm the paranoid and hotheads everywhere who are worth their weight in gold, as Lyndon Johnson once said satellites that monitor the Earth's environmental health, something which we are just beginning to do in a serious way, outward-facing satellites in Earth orbit, like Kobe, for example, which addressed some of the deepest questions about theorigin, nature and destiny of the entire universe, questions that human culture has raised in one way or another and then what I like are spaceships. who visit other planets for themselves, but also to compare them with their own.

I think all of that makes, even in a rather short-term sense, an excellent investment, even if you didn't have even an ounce of exploratory spirit and I can help you. I wonder if you do, but even if you don't, it would make sense to support NASA on these things, sending people is the place where the arguments are not so clear and that's also where it's most expensive, yes, after all, that's what you do. I have seen in scientific experiences, do you believe in God, a timeless creator? something that is omnipotent but something you can't prove empirically probably well if I can't prove empirically how could I believe in it there is no evidence there is no empirical evidence what am I having what other kind of faith is there faith, but faith means believing in the absence of evidence, that's all what you just said, okay, so people could believe absolutely anything without evidence and that would be fine with you, we're not. necessarily scientific, what kind of evidence is there other than scientific, I don't mean that we do it on the spot, but no, what kind of evidence is there that is not scientific, just personal feelings, it can be personal types of revelation, anything that have experienced in the spiritual realm.

Okay, don't let me not argue with you, but try to answer what I know you want to hear, but I personally have a problem with the idea of ​​instinctive religion based on so-called Revelation because anyone can say that God told them anything and I justified any kind of statement without self-correction and the most impressive aspect of the scientific method is that it has error correction machinery built in and humans are deeply vulnerable to error, that's why experimentalists check their instruments, that's why scientists check results from others, this is why graduate students go through agonizing oral doctoral exams, this is why when we submit articles to scientific journals we receive unpleasant reports from referees, this is the built-in error correction mechanism designed to distance us from fallacy, including the fact that we are completely capable of deceiving ourselves, I find none of that error-correcting machinery in bureaucratic religions.

Having said that, let me ask you a question, there is a reason why I will not talk about the evidence base, there is a wide range of different ideas that go under the same rubric God and let me give you the final members of that spectrum. One is that there is a large male with white fur and a long white beard who sits on a throne in the sky and counts every sparrow I have. There is no problem a priori with this idea and in the way it takes me directly back to Java, but it is like my grandfather, but I know of absolutely no evidence, absolutely nothing to support that notion, none of the photographs of our ship spatial, simply nothing, of the other end member.

The practitioners of him are called God, he is the god of Einstein and Spinoza, who is quite close to the sum total of the physical laws of the universe. It would be crazy to deny that there are physical laws of the universe that apply everywhere, that is, ten billion light years away. Same gravity, same quantum mechanics, very impressive fact, but if that's what you mean by God, then of course I believe in God. The evidence that physical laws exist is magnificently good. I've answered your question, so on the topic of creation, you gave some really good ones. less description there is an open question whether the universe needs a creator and let me say a few words about that first if you say yes the universe was created fifteen billion years ago from nothing and I say how it was created and you say God created what happens when I tell you and who created God, you might say, well, wait a minute, that's not fair, that's beyond our ability to understand, why not save a step and say that the creation of the universe is beyond our ability to understand what exactly it is?

You win by saying that a being for which I have no other evidence called God created it and if you say that no one created God God was here always then why not save a step and say that no one created the universe? The universe was always here again, what exactly is it? We learn from the notion that God created the universe, so I don't claim to have answers to these questions, I'm referring to the notion that the universe was created from nothing and the notion that the universe is infinitely old, both of which are very difficult to approach intuitively. and likewise, if you replace the word universe with the word god, but that's at least part of the way I think about these complicated questions and I'm glad you brought it up, thank you.

I was wondering if you also covered psychology a while back. You wrote in Parade magazine about the phenomenon of stories of people being abducted by aliens, and one of the things I appreciated about the article is that you didn't just say, "Well, these people are crazy," but you examined it as a human psychic phenomenon. Well, perhaps some of you know that I am not opposed to the idea of ​​extraterrestrial life. I think it's so quick that you bring up an interesting topic that illuminates our view of ourselves in the universe. I spent a little effort trying to see if it exists with spacecraft or radio telescopes.

Nobody would be happier than me and there is this low level Rumble since 1947, mainly in the United States, that says we are being visited, we are being visited we are being visited and lately there is a new wrinkle or at least it has reached epidemic proportions lately in the that people say that not only do they visit us, I personally say that we have been abducted by small gray beings with very big eyes and expressionless mouths who climbed aboard their flying saucer and experimented. for unspeakable sexual purposes and it was a horrible experience and I'm sorry to have to tell you about it, but in the interest of truth and justice etc.

I would like to go on your TV show and tell the world about Now I have met some of these people . I encountered the prototypical experience: Betty and Barney Hill, who claim to have been kidnapped in the 1960s, and the first thing that becomes clear is that these people feel deep emotions. This is not just ha ha. let's play a little trick something emotionally deep doesn't mean like any corollary in the outside world has happened to them and that's why oh there is some level at which they should be taken seriously as you were saying but I wonder no I don't know if you know that the enthusiasts of the UFOs commissioned a survey from Roper whose conclusion was that 2 percent of all Americans have been abducted, although most of them do not know it and it is easy to do a small calculation to show that over the last few years In the last 40 years, unless aliens have some special preference for Americans, someone has been kidnapped every second all over the planet, it's surprising that many neighbors haven't noticed, so the question is which one, considering our profound ignorance about hallucinations or other unknown internal effects. states and our profound ignorance about extraterrestrial life I mean we are ignorant in both cases if you had to choose which it is more likely that we are being invaded by extraterrestrial sexual abusers or that there is an unknown state of mind that hundreds maybe thousands maybe more people , mainly Americans, are experimenting and if that is the option the answer is clear to me, I mean people hallucinate, people hallucinate, it's a fact and I myself lost my parents and both of them about ten years ago a little more and approximately no.

I don't know six times since then I'll be walking or working on something and just for a minute I hear one of them say Carl, yeah, just that, but they're clearly my mother and father, and I heard that many times in my childhood. I don't think there's anything so peculiar about having a vivid memory of that and I killed Rijn hallucinating all the time monsters the shadow in the closet is a monster every two years three years four years - I feel like I'm sure that most of the People in this audience, if you think back, will remember vivid and terrifying hallucinations in childhood.

There is no reason why we should all lose that completely in an altered person. I think it's something like that and what's more. of great scientific interest, among other things, about the ease with which we can be deceived, about the origins of religion, there is real scientific rubbish here, but it is not about extraterrestrial life. I think the SETI project had discovered unequivocal evidence of extraterrestrial life that we would have read about. published it in the Stanford diary, but have there been tantalizing anomalies that may not be conclusive but might hint at revivals of I Love Lucy from another civilization except I Love Lucy?

The answer is yes, there have certainly been tantalizing events that passed some criteria. for us the intelligence of the retina, but what happens with them is that they do not repeat themselves and a signal that does not repeat itself cannot be examined by skeptical colleagues, it cannot be proven if it really comes from up there and it is not an electronic problem on your electronic devices and is therefore nearby. It would be useless if we had something like that and it sat there for a few days, that would be completely different, but there is much more capable research going on now than we had available before and we are holding on to a nature reserve, essentially evacuating large portions. of population to the wind of another world, yes, okay, the first question we must ask is what is the disparity of births and deaths on the planet, how many more people are born than die each day and the answer is 250,000, so if we were to make a significant dent in the world. population growth by sending people to other planets we would have to send 250,000 people or a little less away from Earth each day.

You will recognize that this is significantly beyond the current capabilities of the masses or any capabilities of all space-capable nations at any foreseeable time in the future. Therefore, addressing population growth by sending people elsewhere is not possible in the foreseeable future. We have to solve the problem right here. I think it is a solvable problem and, without going into details, the key part is increasing the economic self-sufficiency of the poorest billion people on the planet if you worry about global population growth you have to worry about economic injustice all of this It has to do with what is called the demographic transition.

If you want to look for that, I don't want to waste time. Right now, to review it, have I answered your question? Thanks, yes, does our move away from egocentrism in biology have any implications in your mind regarding our use of animals for food and research, among other things? It's hard, it's hard to see that it wouldn't be like that. We know that Darwin's view was that the idea of ​​an unbridgeable gap between us and other animals plays the role of not making us unhappy when we kill them, eat them where they are, etc., and if we recognize the deep connections, then it would be more painful for us. that we treat animals as if they were our property, that we can deal with ourselves that we like and I think a lot of people would say, well, you have to draw the line somewhere and the question is where do you draw it?

Where do you draw the line? I think the fact that chimpanzees and bonobos now seem so similar to us makes it very difficult to draw the line between them and us, and the question of why all over the planet chimpanzees are imprisoned now the greater the distance genetics. Of us for most people, we can more easily kill, mutilate wherever we want the animal or plant in question and I don't want to pretend that this is something that other people don't do. I eat meat, I enjoy it and recognize that our ancestors did it and it is integrated into me, but it has become a somewhat less pleasant experience, especially since I wrote shadows of forgotten ancestors with any dream.

I'm from Europe and we're in Europe, sorry Ireland, some of us are breaking down borders. No, there are open borders. The question is: do you think that will bring the boundaries we have on Earth with us into space? Is there anything we can do to stop it? If we do it. I apologized for the keyword you used three times. like borers I didn't understand orders orders that I use between countries borders yes, separate this country this country right thank you it is a notable fact that it is so difficult to see national borders from space it is so clear that they are man-made and not at all natural too It is a notable fact that carbon dioxide and chlorofluorocarbon molecules are too stupid to appreciate the profound idea of ​​national sovereignty, they cross borders effortlessly, produce CFCs in Seattle and people in Argentina are frying themselves.

In that sense, the planet is one and national borders do not matter at all and in trying to address theenvironmental problems it is completely clear that no nation can do it. It represents a very powerful and upright nation. I'm not going to produce any more CFCs. I'm going to do a total conversion. to alternatives to fossil fuels, what do they get in exchange for their problems? Almost nothing if no one else does it, so these problems are not created by any nation or generation and cannot be solved by any nation or generation. We are reaching a point where the problems we face are fundamentally global planetary and all solutions must be global planetary and that means that it is not an ideological point, whether we like it or not, the differences between nations are going to erode, that it's clearly happening all the time, the European X now in its familiar garb. a willing member and Great Britain a little less is one example, the Montreal Protocol and see if what I mentioned before is another, the global spread of the AIDS epidemic is another, it is something else that does not obey national borders or the communications transport.