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Discord Invitation

10th April 2015

Link

The Unseen Podcast: Episode 2 - Mommy, Where Do Civilizations Come From? →

Paul Carr has speedily made available the second episode of the Unseen Podcast, on which I have appeared again, along with the same panel as last time, with Ciro Villa and Marsha Barnhart, along with our esteemed moderator. The planned agenda for the evening was to be a discussion of Bitcoin and crypto-currencies, but a misunderstanding resulted in that episode being delayed, so anyone available was asked to join in, and that happened to be the same folks as the inaugural Unseen Podcast, minus physicist Ben Tippett.  

I was given a chance to talk extemporaneously about my most recent blog post, Thinking About Civilization, and I’m not sure that I gave a good account of this, but it did serve as a gateway to a variety of questions and queries, and by the end of the episode we came nearly full circle and returned to the topics with which we began.

We were joined late in the episode by Patrick Festa, when we were discussing astrobiology and life in the universe. Mr. Festa asserted his certainty that there is other life in the universe, and if we had had time I would have questioned this, as anything we say about life at this point in time is based on extrapolation from a single data point – viz. Earth – and we have yet to see any biochemistry other than our own.

This is precisely why, earlier in the same episode, I noted how tantalizing the prospect was of looking for life in the oceans of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. In this context I mentioned a passage from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, which, however I could not quote off the top of my head. So here is the quote now:

“The study of a single instance of extraterrestrial life, no matter how humble, will deprovincialize biology. For the first time, the biologists will know what other kinds of life are possible. When we say the search for life elsewhere is important, we are not guaranteeing that it will be easy to find – only that it is very much worth seeking.” (end of Chap. II)

Biology has yet to be deprovincialized, and that deprovincialization could take the form of demonstrating that it was the origin of life itself that was the Great Filter, in which case we will not find life elsewhere. 

I do not necessarily think this is the case, much less do I inevitably think this to be the case – on Centauri Dreams I speculated that we may well live in a universe of stromatolites, which is a view of the abundance of life not too distant from that given voice by Patrick Festa – but until we possess further evidence we must abstain from non-scientific pronouncements of the inevitability of life. This is something that we do not yet know.

Thanks again to Paul Carr for the opportunity to participate.

Tagged: astrobiologyUnseen PodcastPaul Carr